The Education of Sky McCloud

Last Thursday, the Comparative Media Studies Program and the MIT Media Lab played host to Scott McCloud, the comics theorist, creator, entrepreneur, activist, and visionary, who traced for us the progression of his thinking about comics as a medium -- from his first book, Understanding Comics, which gave us a language for thinking about sequential art, through Reinventing Comics, which argued that digital media represented important new opportunities for comics creators and readers, through to Making Comics, which offers practical advice to would-be comics writers and artists and in the process, lays out some important new arguments about the role of choice and styles in graphic storytelling. As McCloud noted, he first spoke in that same room 12 years before in the wake of the first book's publication and I have helped to bring him back to MIT on several other occassions. Indeed, we were lucky enough to have him do a week long workshop for our students several years ago when the ideas for Making Comics were first taking shape. So, with Scott, I knew what we were getting -- an articulate, empassioned, and visionary thinker about comics as a medium, whose work has implications for anyone who thinks seriously about the popular arts. McCloud engaged thoughtfully with questions from the MIT community on everything from the economics of online publishing to the potentials for comics on mobile platforms, from the design of tools for making art to the evolving visual language of the medium. I certainly recommend checking out the audio recording of his presentation and question and answer period.

Yet, the big surprise of the evening was Scott's 13 year old daughter, Sky McCloud. When Scott first asked if his daughter could make her own presentation following his opening remarks, we were not sure what to expect but immediately agreed.

The last time I had seen Sky, she was a toddler interupting her father's talk at Harvard's Veracon. Today, she is a dynamic young woman - a delightful mix of goth and geek -- who felt self confident enough to share her own perspective in front of a packed Bartos auditorium crammed with several hundred MIT and Harvard types.

She told us about the family's plans to do a 50 state speaking tour over the next year as her father rolls out his new book and as the family (Scott, his wife, Ivy, and his daughters, Sky and Winter) conduct an experiment in home schooling. Each member of the family is blogging about the trip over on Live Journal. And they are working together to produce a series of podcasts which they are calling Winterviews (after youngest daughter, Winter, who will be the on-camera presence in these films). The daughters will research about some of the comics people they will meet along the way, read and discuss some of their work, prepare questions, do interviews, and edit them for transmission via the web. Sky is also preparing an evolving powerpoint presentation as they travel to explain to various audiences about the trip and what they have learned along the way.

Meanwhile, she remains in contact with a larger circle of home schooled kids who are also tapping into their interests in popular culture (in this case, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars) to inform critical essays and research projects. We all concluded that Sky could be a poster child for the new media literacies we have been exploring through our project with the MacArthur Foundation -- someone who is tapping the full range of new media technologies to learn and share what she is learning with a larger community. Sky is incredibly articulate, holding her own debating the fine points of comics aesthetics with her dad and fully comfortably plopping herself down and conversing with a room full of graduate students. We were delighted to hear her say she was potentially interested in being an MIT student some day. She won the hearts of many of us here.

Let's be clear: Sky is an exceptional child, the offspring of a remarkable man, and her parents have had the flexibility to incorporate her learning (and that of her sister) into their professional lives. Not just everyone can take off for a year and travel the country with their family and still take in an income from speaking gigs. Yet, the core of what they are accomplishing here should be part of the educational experience of every child -- what she is learning grows organically from her own interests; she is being encouraged to express herself across a range of different media; she is encouraged to translate what she is learning back into public communication and is empowered to believe that what she thinks may matter to others. As I have suggested in a blog post this summer, these experiences are so far more available outside of the formal educational system through afterschool programming and home schooling than they are in the public classroom. Like many other home schoolers we have encountered through our research, she is using the potentials of new media both for creative expression and social networking.

I know that I make some people nervous when I talk here about the values of home schooling. Many people assume that home schooling is mostly used today by the religious right to escape secular education. But in fact, today's home schoolers come from many different backgrounds and are stepping outside of formal education for many different reasons. More and more kids are moving in and out of schools depending on where they are at in their emotional, social, and intellectual development or what kind of situation they are confronting in their local community. My wife and I home schooled our son for a year when he was Sky's age and oddly enough, one of his primary textbooks was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, but at the end of that year, he returned to a private school for the rest of his high school experience. I am not suggesting everyone should home school their kids. Most people should not. But I am glad that it is an option and I think that educators should study what is working in these home school contexts and pull the best of it back into their pedagogical practices. As they do so, they could learn a lot by listening to Sky McCloud speak about her experiences on the webcast of the event.

The Beauty of Brian Michael Bendis

For several posts now, I've been running an interview with Alan McKee, the editor of Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, a book designed to focus attention on the ways fans and consumers evaluate different forms of popular culture. McKee asked his contributors to do several things at once: first, to choose the "best of class" within a form of popular culture which we had deep investments and then to set about to justify that choice in terms of the criteria which consumers most often use to evaluate good and bad work in that space. I used the invitation as an excuse to write about superhero comics. From the start, it was clear that my preferences in comics have as much or more to do with their authors as with their artists. In many cases, I read pretty much everything published by certain writers: favorites include Robert Kirkman, Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, Neil Gaiman, Ed Brubaker, and Brian Michael Bendis. Already to focus on superhero comics is to navigate between two fairly strong taste communities around comics:

Comic fans are sharply divided into two camps: on the one side, there are fans of comics as popular culture (with a focus on the creative reworking of genre elements and plays with continuity) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Wizard; on the other side, there are fans of comics as art (with a focus on aesthetic experimentation and unconventional content) and their voice is perhaps best represented by Comics Journal. At my local shop, the two types of books are divided off from each other by a partition designed to keep the kids from mangling the adult books, but also working to signal a certain cultural hierarchy at play. To praise Bendis as one of today's best writers is already to take sides since the Comics Journal crowd will look down their noses at you if you admit to reading superhero comics.

The most interesting contemporary comics fall somewhere between these two extremes - including work published by smaller companies like ABC, Oni, Image, Dark Horse, or Wildstorm which put their own spin on the superhero genre or works published by the boutique labels, such as Vertigo at DC or Max at Marvel, which are maintained by the mainstream publishers. Increasingly, the lines between mainstream and indie comics are breaking down. Much as indie filmmakers are getting a shot at directing Hollywood blockbusters, indie comics creators (such as Gilbert Hernandez, John Strum, or Peter Bagge) are venturing into the mainstream without risking their street cred.

I ended up choosing Bendis in part because he represented so many of the trends reshaping contemporary comics -- not the least of which was a the tendency discussed above to blur the lines between indie and mainstream comics. Bendis came from alternative comics and brought some of that sensativity to the mainstream.

My essay tries to determine what made Bendis a unique voice in the superhero genre (despite some profound differences in theme and audience across his various books) and also what made him exemplary of contemporary comics production. What follows are a few excerpts from the essay.

The Ultimate

In Ultimate Spiderman 28 (henceforth U.S.), M.J. comes racing into the Midtown High School library and asks her boyfriend, Peter Parker, whether he brought his costume. Rhino is smashing up downtown Manhattan and no one has been able to stop him. Asking M.J. to cover for his fourth period French class, he races to his locker and grabs his Spider-man costume (hidden in his knapsack), only to run into his Aunt May who is at school for a parent-teacher meeting. As Peter squirms in his chair, the teacher accuses him of being 'distracted' and 'unfocused' in class. Begging off, he races for the door, only to spot the school principal, and then spin off down another hallway. He cuts through the school cafeteria where he catches the lunch lady grumbling that the Rhino coverage is interrupting her soaps, then out the door, where he runs into his friend, Gwen, who is sobbing that nobody cares about her. Extracting himself from this emotional crisis, Peter races out of the school, stopping long enough to shout to M.J. to go see after Gwen. A few seconds later, Peter gets clocked by a football and chased by the school bullies, before scaling over the walls, scampering across rooftops, and riding on the tops of cars, arriving just in time to see Iron Man taking kudos for stopping the Rhino's rampage.

Whew! We've all had days like this.

I always wondered how even an ultra-nerd like Peter could manage to skip classes so often (all in the call of duty, of course) without ending up flunking out or spending the rest of his life in detention. From the start, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko conceived Spider-man as sharing the flaws and foibles of his teen readers . Forget Metropolis and Gotham City: Marvel set its stories in actual locations in Manhattan. They relied on the sudden introduction of real world problems, such as not having enough money to buy a new costume or not knowing how to explain why you just stood up your hot date, to increase audience identification. What counted as comic book realism in the 1960s doesn't necessarily work for contemporary kids. Through the Ultimate Spider-Man series, Brian Michael Bendis retools Ol' Spidey for a generation that has grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, creating a comic that is as hip and 'postmodern' as it gets.

Bendis has fleshed out the core characters, changing the way they dress and talk to reflect contemporary mallrat culture, but not altering their core. In this case, the supportive M.J., the concerned Aunt May, and the 'drama queen' Gwen are used as comic foils to amplify Peter's struggle to escape the gravitational pull of his high school. Bendis also reconceptualized some members of the Spider-man rogue's gallery to up their 'coolness' factor - turning the usually dorky Rhino into a powerful mecha-man who tosses city buses through Starbuck's windows. The well-crafted issue maintains a frantic pace that keeps you turning pages. It contrasts with previous issues, coming right after an angsty story arc that took us inside the head of the Green Goblin and almost cost M.J. her life. It builds on evolving character's relations, such as M.J.'s new involvement in Peter's superhero life; and it prepares for future plot developments, such as the growing rift in Gwen's family. Artist Mark Bagley distills the essence of the characters into telling gestures, such as M.J. waving frantically from an upper window for Peter to get moving, Peter staring off into space during the parent-teacher conference, or a frustrated Spider-Man watching as Iron Man throws his hands up in victory.

The Bendis Moment

Film critics used to write about 'the Lubitsch touch' . Ernest Lubitsch melded European sophistication with classic Hollywood storytelling, adding one more layer of suggestion to the basic building blocks of the romantic comedy. Today, comics fans might talk about the 'Bendis moment'. Bendis always adds his own distinctive twist to the familiar characters and situations of the superhero genre, creating 'memorable moments' which will be discussed, debated, and savored by the fan boys. Half the time Bendis infuriates us by doing the unthinkable; the other half, he rewards us by taking us places we never imagined we'd get to go; but no matter what, he produces comics we want to talk about. A Bendis moment can be as innocent as Peter Parker, sprawled on the floor cradling his crumpled Spider-Man costume and sobbing over his breakup with M.J. (U.S. 33) or as crude as the controversial sequence in Alias (1) (henceforth A), where it is implied that the protagonist, Jessica Jones is having anal sex with Luke Cage, one of the few African-American characters in the Marvel universe.

One of the most memorable Bendis moments came when Parker gets rescued by three of the hotest mutant 'babes' from the Ultimate X-men cast. As Spidey 'fans,' they are just tickled to death to meet him. The telepath Jean Grey gushes that he's the first guy she's met in months that hasn't tried to imagine her naked (U.S. 43). Across fourteen awkward panels, Bendis and Bagley cut between Peter and Jean, as he tries, without success, not to think of her naked and as she waits impatiently for him to get over it. Any guy who has wanted desperately to be 'better than the others' and has had their hormones get in the way must surely feel for Peter's predicament confronting a girl who can read his every conflicted thought. Such moments grow organically out of the interplay between characters we know and love and exploit the juxtaposition between the fantastical situations we associate with superhero comics and a much more mundane reality we live in most of the time.

Bendis, Who?

Bendis writes what industry insiders call 'buzz books,' managing to be a critical darling who racks up awards and a commercial success who tops the charts. Bendis has won both the Wizard award (from fans) and the Eisner award (from fellow pros) for best writer for the past two years. Most months, he writes four or five of the twenty five top-selling comics. Wizard has called Bendis the 'Michael Jordan of Marvel,' citing this most valuable player as one of the key factors behind the company's commercial and critical revival over the past few years . (Somewhere around here, I keep wanting to toss off a 'Bendis like Beckham' pun.) As Marvel president Bill Jemas explains, 'Brian delivers hundreds of thousands of fans every month. He makes all of those fans happy and brings them back'. Wonder Woman scribe Greg Rucka praises Bendis as the consummate professional, 'He has a complete command of the art. Every aspect of the writer's job, he can do it well, and understands it intuitively. He's got every trick in the toolbox and god knows, he knows how to use them.'

And to top it all, he is amazingly prolific, cranking out five to eight different titles every month over the past several years. Ultimate Spider-Man alone adds up to eighteen issues a year. When Marvel needed a pinch hitter for Ultimate X-Men, Bendis crossed over and added another biweekly title to his workload, even as he was helping to launch Ultimate Fantastic Four and knock off the Ultimate Six mini-series.

His commercial success and professionalism has earned Bendis the creative freedom to take risks and the power to reshape the Marvel universe. As Bendis notes, 'I get paid whether I kick ass or phone it in. Why not kick ass?'. And kick ass he does, month after month....

Bendis has said that his greatest excitement as a writer comes when he paints himself into a corner and then has to figure out how to get back out again. Bendis constantly takes risks that a lesser writer would avoid and then makes them pay off for the reader, inviting us to think about the superheroes, their rogues galleries, their supporting characters, and their worlds in fresh new ways. Sometimes that pisses off the old-timers. Bendis sparked controversy with some of his earliest work for Marvel from fans who felt that he was putzing around with Elektra, a character introduced by Frank Miller during his acclaimed run of Daredevil . ...

The recent history of the superhero genre has been marked by several movements between deconstructionist writers (such as Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, or Grant Morrison) who critiqued the genre's fascist fantasies, and reconstructionist writers (such as Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Mark Millar, Jeph Loeb, or Greg Rucka) who have sought to put the 'Wow!' back in the genre . Bendis's deft writing allows him to move back and forth between the two camps, chipping away at clichés, critiquing underlying assumptions, while at the same time offering the kind of slobberknocking fight scenes and high flying adventures that make comic fans grin. Each Bendis book offers a different angle on the superhero genre: depicting a young man learning the ropes and facing adult dismissals (Ultimate Spiderman), a more mature superhero whose world seems to be coming apart before his eyes (Daredevil), a former B-level superhero who sometimes has trouble getting the A-listers on the telephone (Alias), and a bunch of beat cops who have to unravel the scandals and conspiracies celebrity superheroes hope to hide from their tabloid-reading public (Powers). Bendis clearly loves the genre, but he's more than willing to take the piss out of it....

Dialogue

Wizard praises Bendis for 'dialogue that pops and snaps more than a fresh bowl of Rice Krispies.' ...

Superhero comics are notorious for their clunky or over-inflated dialogue, dating back to a time when the pictures were crude and the writers sometimes had to fill in plot information the artist never got around to drawing. So, you have the situation where characters describe things that would be obvious to anyone standing at the location or where villains spell out their entire plans. Sometimes the entire book is nothing but exposition as the writer tries to cram an ambitious story into far too few pages. Only belatedly did comic writers see dialogue as a means of defining the characters or setting the emotional tone. When Peter Parker first realizes that he has spider strength, Stan Lee has him exclaim, 'What's happening to me? I feel - different! As though my entire body is charged with some fantastic energy,' and then has him go into a long wonkish discussion of how his various powers parallel those of the common spider . (Come to think of it, maybe that is how the geekish protagonist would react!) Bendis deals with a similar discovery in Alias in a far more down to earth manner. An angry adolescent is trudging along through a city park, her mind million miles away, and then, suddenly, realizes that her feet are no longer touching the ground and that she has no idea how to land again. Her: 'Shit! Oh Shit!' economically expresses her shift between giddy excitement and gut-wrenching terror....

Bendis adopts more naturalistic patterns of communication, including a focus on the various ways people struggle, in real life, to adequately express their ideas. A recent anthology, Total Sellout, shares a series of his monologues, some autobiographical, others based on things he overheard on the street, which shows his early fascination with human speech patterns. Bendis loves to weave complex layers of word balloons across the page, allowing well-drawn character study to hold our interest in the absence of more visceral action sequences. This technique came into its own in Jinx, which includes rambling debates between various lowlife characters on such issues as the letterboxing of movies that recall the debate about Madonna videos that opens Reservoir Dogs or the famous Le Cheese Royale exchange in Pulp Fiction. ...

Critics accuse Bendis of being verbose and he certainly uses more words per page than anyone else. Yet, Bendis knows when to pull back and let his images speak for him, making effective use of wordless montages which convey the character's thought processes. Consider the moment in Ultimate Spider-Man 14 where the meat-headed Kong almost discovers Spiderman's secret identity but is unable to hold all of the pieces of information together in his mind; or the scene in Alias 21 where we see a teen-aged Jessica's thoughts as she masturbates to a pinup of Johnny Storm (ending with a close-up of her curling toes). Perhaps most spectacularly, an entire issue of Powers (31) includes only the grunts of subhuman apes as Bendis traces the origins of the superhero back to prehistoric times. Throughout Alias, Bendis contrasts the information-dump that Jessica receives from her clients with wordless shots showing the detective absorbing and reacting to the information....

A Bastard Art

Bendis himself sets the terms by which we evaluate his work. He told interviewers at Write Now!: 'I heard a quote from Sting, that rock-and-roll is a bastard art form. That there is no one thing that makes rock-and-roll, rock-and-roll, that it only really succeeds when somebody makes the conscious personal decision to pull something new into it from outside like jazz, country, or opera. Something vital happens then. I think comics are the same way. There is no one thing that makes a great comic. Each time someone's gone outside of comics and pulled something into it. For their own reasons, something really exciting happens. A lot of artists have done that, but not a lot of writers.'

Bendis has helped to revitalize the modern superhero comics by pulling into the genre a range of techniques which in other art forms insure naturalism: his reliance on fragmented and sometimes incomplete dialogue; his interest in documenting the perspectives of professional groups or youth subcultures; his attention to the mundane details of everyday life; his ability to allow characters to grow and develop over time. He talks about his comics alongside the work of writers like David Mamet or Richard Price, refusing to accept a second-class status for his own medium. Rather, his work does something theirs can not - build on a thirty or forty year history of our relationships with these characters, push these ideas into alternative realities and use them to comment on our own lived experiences, and, oh yeah, capture the hearts and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of teenagers.

For those of comics fans in the Boston area, you might be interested to know we are hosting a public lecture by Scott McCloud on his new book, Making Comics, this thursday, 5-7 pm, in the MIT Media Lab's Bartos Theater. It is a joint CMS-Media Lab event. For those outside the Boston area, we hope to provide a podcast of the event early next week.

comics and convergence part three

This is the third of a series of out-takes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide which centers on convergence within the comics industry. This segment explores the ways that online communities are altering the ways that comics readers and publishers interact. A small portion of this content found its way into the book's conclusion in a significantly altered form, but the rest of it is appearing here for the first time.

Shortly before Ang Lee's feature film version of The Incredible Hulk was released, USA Today ran a front page story about the expanded power of internet fans in shaping the production and promotion of cult movies. Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film production unit, explained, "I used to hate the Internet. I thought it was just a place where people stole our products. But I see how influential these fans can be when they build a consensus, which is what we seek. I now consider them filmmaking partners." USA Today recounted the emergence of so-called "superfans" - opinion-makers within the fan community who are actively courted by movie producers. Production companies will pay to fly these "superfans" out to the set to talk with stars and directors about a forthcoming release and in some cases, consult with them to insure fidelity to the original source material. Avad acknowledged that he sought casting advice from these fan communities: "These are people who grew up with their heroes in mind. You won't ever get everyone to agree on one actor, but they can tell you if you're going in the right direction." The most influential sites receive more than 5 million visitors per month. In some earlier cases, the studios have gone head to head with these sites, sticking by unpopular decisions, only to sustain box office damage. Now, the article suggested, fans were having more influence than ever before.

Kurt Busiek, the writer of Marvels and Astro City, argues that these online discussion groups represent an extension of traditional forms of publicity and criticism within the comics fan community: "It used to be that the two areas of communications among comic fans were the fan press and word of mouth. Somewhere in the community around every comic book store would be the guys in the know. They'd talk about comics in the store and whatever they thought was cool would filter into the rest of the audience... The internet has taken the mechanisms of fandom, word of mouth, and commercial reactions, intensified it, increased the speed of it, and made it much, much more efficient.... Instead of having to wait for a couple of months to read something like the Comics Reader to cover some comic news, it hits the internet news sites as it happens. The Friday Mark Waid was fired from Fantastic Four, there was a news article on the web and being discussed by Sunday and by Monday morning, the people at Marvel Comics came to work and they had to react to it." When fan reaction emerges this quickly and spreads so far, it commands much greater attention within the industry. Increasingly, internet response is shaping publisher's decision making.

The Sequential Tart has emerged as a central site for women in comics fandom, serving as an advocacy group for female consumers frustrated by their historic neglect or patronizing treatment by the comics industry. Started in 1997, by a group of female fans of Garth Ennis ( Preacher), the group expanded its focus, seeking to provide a female-written alternative to what they saw as the locker-room humor and ogling images found in most of the publications aimed at predominantly male comics fans. Marcia Allas, the current editor of Sequential Tart, explained , "Essentially our goals were to provide a magazine that would have content to appeal across as broad a spectrum of new or established comics readers as possible, regardless of age, gender, sexuality, or individual taste...In the early days we also wanted to change the apparent perception of the female reader of comics. It seemed that there were a lot of misapprehensions about this audience, such as that female comics readers either didn't really exist, or that they only followed one or two titles. Where they were acknowledged to exist, there were some bewildering stereotypes of what they would read, what they would dislike, and so forth. We wanted to show what we already knew - that the female audience for comics, while probably smaller than the male audience, is both diverse and has a collectively large disposable income."

In her study of Sequential Tart, Kimberly M. De Vries argues that the group self-consciously rejects both the negative stereotypes about female comics readers constructed by men in and around the comics industry but also the well-meaning but equally constraining stereotypes constructed by the first generation of feminist critics of comics. The Sequential Tart is, in that sense, a Third Wave feminist cultural intervention, defending the pleasures women take in comics even as it critiques some of the negative representations of women through the medium. De Vries sees this as asserting a politics of consumption as much or more than a politics of production.

The webzine combines interviews with comics creators, retailers, and industry leaders, reviews of current publications, and critical essays about gender and comics. They sought to showcase industry practices which attracted or repelled women, to spotlight the work of smaller presses which often fell through the cracks, to skewer sexist writing or images, and to help readers find books which were better geared to their own tastes and interests. The Sequential Tart are increasingly courted by publishers or individual artists who feel they have content that would be of interest to female readers and have helped to make the mainstream publishers more attentive to this often underserved market. The Sequential Tart, in turn, have provided a model for a range of other comics fans webzines and discussion boards who have been inspired by what a small team of writers had been able to accomplish.

Allas contends that they would never have been able to have this same degree of impact if they had relied on print rather than digital media. She cites, for example, the geographic dispersion of the core group of editors and writers, not only across the United States, but globally. The web provided a platform for them to share what they knew and to form a community which was grassroots without being geographically local. She also notes that they were able to launch the webzine with almost no financial commitment, reflecting the lowered costs of production and distribution in the digital environment. These savings allowed them to operate independently of any corporate interests. It also allowed them to get their ideas out quickly and widely and to publish on a more regular basis. All of that made it possible for The Sequential Tart to become, almost upon launch, a force to be reckoned with in comics fandom and in the comics industry more generally.

comics and convergence part two

This entry continues the series of outtakes from Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Again, the primary focus is on comics. Here, the focus is on the ways comics content is moving into film and television as well as the ways that television and film content increasingly is moving into comics.

Paul Levitz, President of DC Comics, characterizes comics as having a "permeable membrane" to the other sectors of the entertainment industry. It is easy for comics's highly visual content to be translated into film or television series. Because the pay is low, comics represent a recruiting ground for new talent which, in turn, get absorbed into other media industries. Increasingly, comics are a playground where writers successful in other media - such as Kevin Smith in film or J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon in television - can do creative work that would be harder to be funded in those other media.

From the beginning, comics content has moved into other media sectors. In the 1910s and 1920s, the popularity of Buster Brown, one early comic strip character, spilled over from the daily newspaper into live action films, stage shows, popular songs, toys, and advertising. Today, if Buster Brown is known at all, it is through the shoe company which still bears his name and image.

Similarly, within five years after the initial introduction of Superman, the character could be found in movie serials, animated shorts, and radio dramas, and subsequently, on television, stage shows, and computer games. This flow of comics content into other media is in many ways a prototype for our contemporary franchise system of media production.

Over the past few years, comics content has been increasingly in demand. Many recent comic-themed movies, including Spider-Man and X-Men, have become box office successes, and comics content has also influenced production in independent cinema (Ghost World, Road to Perdition, American Splendor, Sin City).

DC Comics, the company which controls Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, among others, is owned by Time Warner, one of the major transmedia companies. DC Comics President Paul Levitz has outlined what he sees as the advantages of that relationship: "You gain the ability to work for the long run, you gain the ability to exploit creative properties across many different platforms, and at the same time, to be able to take the economic position in them that allows a single entity to brand and manage the assets so they can be deployed sensibly. You get a company that understands the line of work you are in so that you can take the appropriate creative risk, look for opportunities....There is no character in American culture who has been in as many media as Superman...It is difficult to name an entertainment medium that Superman has had no presence in....Did we benefit from having most of those assets stay under one roof? Yeah. We are still able to control rights to the George Reeves Superman shows...We are able to keep the Christopher Reeves movies on or off the air, according to our view of how they support the current initiatives whether Smallville, the new movies, an animated series, the comics, what have you. Our competitors are usually not able to do this."

By contrast, Marvel, the publisher of Spider-Man, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four, among others, subcontracts with studios to produce media versions of its franchises, while increasingly maintaining creative control over the process. As Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film division explains, "we pick the studio that will best nurture the product because basically they all want the Marvel brand." Arad's division emerged as Marvel began to reconceptualize itself less as a comics publisher and more as an intellectual property company which would generate the bulk of its revenue from licensing its characters for movies, games, television series, and toys.

Other smaller comics companies or independent artists will sell the rights to their work on a case by case basis. Dark Horse Comics, Inc., for example, has been the launching pad for several recent media properties, including Men in Black, The Mask, and Tank Girl. In this context, even relatively obscure titles can attract industry interest. Steve Niles's and Ben Templesmith's Thirty Days of Night, a horror comic about vampires in Alaska, published by IDW Comics, was optioned for film production before the first issue hit the stands.

Throughout most of this history, the number of people who would encounter these characters in films or other media has remained significantly higher than the percentage who read comics; filmmakers assume that many viewers had little or no previous exposure to these characters; the films had to operate outside the complex continuity and back story which shapes contemporary comics productions; and in many cases, the characters had to be reintroduced or significantly reworked to reflect the tastes of a mass audience as opposed to those of a niche readership. In turn, it is often the look and feel of the character in the movies which shapes other media spin-offs, such as video games, because the movie reaches far more people than will see the comics. Comics publishers often coincide the debut of new plotlines in the comics to these releases so that readers, turned on by what they see on screen, can find a jumping on point to the series.

As content flows across media, it is often accompanied by creative talent who got their start in comics. For example, Brian Michael Bendis, the creator of Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man series, was hired to be script editor for an animated series based on the character for airing on MTV and to help direct the production of games set in the Marvel universe. In some cases, creative talents move fluidly across media. A notable example there would be Neil Gaiman who has been successful not only as the creator of The Sandman comic book series, but also has written English language scripts for Japanese anime films (Princess Mononoke), published best-selling novels (American Gods) and children's books (Coraline), and written original series for British television (Neverwhere). His short stories have, in turn, been adopted into comic book form by other writers and artists and into radio dramas.

Extension works in the other direction as well, with comics becoming a low cost, low risk means of expanding existing media franchises. Kevin Smith, the filmmaker who created Clerks and Chasing Amy, has been a long time comics shop owner and fan. He has developed a series of comic books which extends the stories of the characters he introduced in his so-called New Jersey films, in many cases, using them to provide back story or motivation for actions we observed on screen. Similarly, Joss Whedon, the creative producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has used comics to fill in gaps between episodes and perhaps more interestingly, to expand the time line of the series. Tales of the Slayers, for example, depicts the adventures of previous vampire slayers ranging across the full span of human history, while Fray depicts a slayer several hundred years in our future, battling demons and vampires in a world reminiscent of Bladerunner. Michael Chabon won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which dealt with the early history of the American comic books industry and introduced a range of original superhero characters. Chabon subsequently worked with comic book writers and artists to develop a series focused on The Escapist, Luna Moth and his other original characters.

Comics and Convergence Part One

This is the first of a series of outtakes -- passages written for Convergence Culture, but ultimately cut for reasons of length. Each represents a snap shot of convergence culture at work. Most of these sections were intended as side bars. Those of you who have read the book will know that it is structured around a series of core case studies that are developed in depth and sidebars which suggest other dimensionhs of the topic. Sidebars seemed like the most effective way of juxtaposing these other examples to the core discussion and seemed appropriate given the book's focus on the way we pull together information from multiple sources. What I like about the sidebars is that readers will engage with them at different points in the reading process as their own whims dictate and thus each reader's experience of the argument will be slightly different. Some will read them as they go; some will wait to the end of the chapter and then go back to read them, and so forth. This section introduces comic books as a particularly rich site for understanding media change. As regular readers will note, I find comics a particularly interesting and relatively underexplored medium. Experiments in new approaches to popular storytelling often take place in comics -- the risks are relatively low both because of lowered cost of production and because of the fringe nature of their readership. At the same time, comics content is being drawn into the commercial mainstream. More and more recent films have been based on comics -- not simply predictible superhero fare such as X-Men, Batman Begins, or Spider-Man, but also off-beat independent films, such as American Splender, Ghost World, Road to Perdition, A History of Violence, and V for Vendetta, among others. I am a hardcore comics fan so you will be seeing lots of examples of trends from comics coming under my analytic gaze as this blog continues.

For those of you who own Convergence Culture, you can always print out these sections and tap them inside your book to assemble your own director's cut edition. :-) For the rest of you, these will give you a taste of the style and structure of the book.

Once mainstream, comics are increasingly a fringe (even an avant garde) form of entertainment, one that appeals predominantly to college students or college-educated professionals. While few read comics, their content flows fluidly across media platforms, finding wide audiences in film, television, and computer games. Something like twenty times the number of people went to see the Spider-Man movie its opening day than had read a Spider-Man comic the previous year. As Avi Arad, the head of Marvel's film division, explains, "You can't do $155 million with just Marvel geeks." Comics creators are torn between the desire to create content which will attract mainstream interest ( to sell it off to other media companies and to broaden their own readership) and producing content which appeals to and retains their hardcore readers.

Comics have entered a period of experimentation, testing new themes, adopting diverse styles, and expanding their genre vocabulary. Because the cost of production and thus the price of experimentation is much lower in comics than in any other medium, film and television monitor comics, searching for material which can be brought from the fringes into the mainstream. The turnaround between conception and distribution is much shorter in comics with the result that they will be among the first media to respond to new cultural developments. Comics now function, as longtime DC Comics editor Dennis O'Neil has commented, as "The R&D Division" for the rest of the entertainment industry. And for that reason, many dimensions of convergence are felt first in comics.

Comics are media hybrids, combining words and images (including both representations and symbols). Not all comics have words and some artists pride themselves on telling stories purely through images. The relative prominence of words and images shifts across the history of the medium with early comics being much more text-centered - though some argue that this reversed itself when the size of newspaper comics shrunk, making it harder for readers to process more detailed images. At different moments in the medium's history (and at different companies), scripts emerged first from writers and were subsequently illustrated or scripts emerged by artists drawing panels which were subsequently retrofitted with dialogue. And in some cases, the same artist writes and draws the comic, often creating a greater integration of words and images.

Pictorial storytelling has been ignored within common periodizations of media history which discuss a general evolution from orality to literacy, from literacy to print, and from print to mass media. Less gets said about the way that pictorial media supported oral storytelling (as is currently believed to be the case with cave paintings or in the sand paintings done by some Arab storytellers to illustrate their tales) or helped to mediate between oral and text-based cultures (as in the case of stainglass windows and tapestries during the middle ages). Most of us have a fairly narrow definition of what we mean by comics - the short strips focused on cute children and funny animals found in the daily newspaper and the longer stories focused on superheroes found at a comic book store. Scott McCloud, the comics theorist and practitioner, has argued for a more expansive definition: "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence."

McCloud argues that there is nothing preordained about the current selection of genres which dominate comics. Indeed, comics took on different kinds of content, built on different aesthetic traditions, reached different audiences, and achieved different cultural status in Japan or in France than in the United States. Moreover, comics are not inherently bound to print culture and McCloud identifies a range of different delivery mechanisms for sequential arts: "A close reading of various ancient works yielded far more than a passing resemblance to comics. Whether decorating the walls of a painted tomb, spiraling in bas-relief up a stone column, parading across a 230-foot tapestry, or zigzagging across an accordion-folded painted deerskin, such works were, despite their exotic styles, comics to the core, telling stories in deliberate sequences of pictures....Ink on paper is just one of the physical forms comics can take, but it's the one form many feel most comfortable calling 'comics'."

Comics, then might be characterized less as a medium than as a mode of expression, cutting across not only different delivery mechanisms (the newspaper supplement, the printed comic book, the carved column, the tapestry) but also across multiple media (print, digital). In that sense, comics share something in common with poetry, which has moved across oral culture, print culture, and digital culture while preserving its own distinctive traditions.

Many familiar aspects of comics - such as panel borders or the left to right and up to down reading protocols or the use of word balloons or the continuation of protagonists across multiple stories - emerged from the specific properties of print culture. These protocols have a certain inertia, in so far as we think about emerging media through the filters of older media practices but they are also subject to change, in so far as each medium creates different working conditions and different markets. On one level, comics have enjoyed enormous continuity with some recurring characters - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, for example - appearing more or less continuously for sixty years or more. On another level, little else remains the same in comics across that period. Changes in how comics are published, where they are distributed, who reads them, and how they are regulated, have an enormous impact on how the stories of these characters are told.

In his book, Reinventing Comics, Scott McCloud argues that digital media may be the best - and perhaps the last - hope for comics to find a larger reading public, having cut themselves off from mainstream visibility through their dependence upon specialty shops as their primary distribution venues. McCloud imagines a world where independent comic artists sell their products directly to the consumer without confronting any middle men or gatekeepers, where more diverse comics content can find audiences well beyond the hardcore comics readers, and where the formal vocabulary of comics can expand, freed from the limits of the printed page. McCloud's book embraces elements of supercession and liberation. As McCloud argues, "Not every creator can expect to strike it rich in the new market, but every individual vision of comics will at least get its day in the sun. Comics designed to reach out to non-fans will no longer have to hide where only fans will see them but instead will connect with their true market and in time, comics can begin to earn the diverse audiences it so desperately needs."

The web has emerged as an important publicity and distribution channel for comics - though ironically, so far, the companies making the most money have been local specialty shops, such as Denver's Mile High Comics, which have seen cyberspace as a means of expanding their market. 75 percent of its sales come from online visitors to a site that receives 12 million hits per month. Such sites put comics in the reach of many who do not live in close proximity to comic shops, though they are also forcing some local shops out of business. As they reach a national market, these online retailers are particularly good sources for back issues, buying them from one consumer and marketing them to another. The major comics companies - Marvel and (the now defunct) CrossGen in particular - have experimented with making some of their comics content available on the web. Marvel boasted 1.3 million downloaded "dot-comics" per month at the peak of the site's success. Most established comics creators use their home pages to communicate more directly with their fans and to get immediate reactions to their work. The discussion forums on such sites are so popular that many comic books have discontinued their longstanding practice of publishing readers' letters, feeling that these missives will go out of date by the time they are printed.

By some estimates, as many as 3000 independent comics artists have chosen to begin their careers in digital comics. In some cases, they target readers who would not typically enter a comic shop. Tak Toyoshima's Secret Asian Man, for example, is one of a number of comics which targets the Asian-American community. In some cases, these comics have proven their market value and been picked up by a comic book publisher. A notable recent success was Scott Kurtz's PvP,/ a web comic on role-playing and computer games, which is now being printed. Others become successful in web-based syndication. Astounding Space Thrills (currently off-line), for example, appears on more than 3000 web sites, each of which pays to support the production of new content. Most such comics are labors of love or designed to pave the way for commercial success, yet, so far, comics artists have had difficulty getting paid for the work they distribute online.

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Four

This is the final installment (at least for the time being) of a series I have been doing about how the comic book world has responded to September 11 and the politics of Homeland Security. I wrote it in response to several recent essays that have offered somewhat stereotypical versions of how comic book superheroes relate to the current policies of the Bush administration. I wanted to show that comic books have, in general, avoided jingoism in favor of a more thoughtful engagement with the ways what happen at the World Trade Center have changed the society we live in. In Part Three, I discussed three contemporary comic books -- DMZ (published by DC's Vertigo imprint), Ex Machina (published by Wildstorm) and Squadron Supreme (published by Marvel) -- which suggest the lasting impact of September 11 on comics culture. The three books take somewhat different strategies for dealing with the current political landscape-- DMZ is speculative fiction about a future American Civil War that results in part from over-extending U.S. military presence overseas; Ex Machina offers us a political drama where the Mayor of New York City happens to be a superhero; and Squadron Supreme represents a team of superheroes whose pursuit of American foreign policy objectives pose a series of ethical concerns.

What these three books have in common is a refusal to offer easy answers or paint black and white pictures. All three suggest that there are multiple sides for any issue and try to constantly force readers to rethink our own assumptions. These books are hard to classify in left or right terms -- they are certainly critical of many aspects of current policies, especially those that involve violations of civil liberties, but then, only about 30 something percent of the American public might be described as enthusiastic about those policies on any given week. A large number of libertarians and traditional conservatives are raising serious concern about our current Homeland Security policies along similar lines. Each of these books tap the genre conventions of popular culture but use them to focus attention on crucial social and political concerns.

Near the end of Convergence Culture, I speculate that popular culture may provide a common ground for us to explore important policy issue precisely because we are often willing to suspend fixed ideological categories in order to explore its fantasies; because we don't define our relationship to popular culture exclusively or primarily in partisan terms; because it offers a shared set of metaphors to talk about things that matter to us; and because it brings together a community that cuts across party lines. As Barrack Obama might have said, we watch West Wing in the red states and we watch 24 in the blue states, and if we can talk together as fans, maybe we can rebuild a basis for communications on other levels. In this context, popular culture has a vital role to play as civic media. As a comics fan, I am proud to see the comics industry rise to the occasion perhaps better than any other entertainment medium (well, excluding the fine work going on over at Comedy Central.)

That's why I am so excited about Marvel's Civil War project this summer.

Civil War

For one thing, the comics I discussed above, though released by major publishers who have good distribution, still represent relative niche products. They don't involve any of the major franchises at DC or Marvel that account for the overwhelming majority of sales of American published comics in this country (I phrase it this way to separate out the huge success of manga which is a separate story for another day.) Civil War, by contrast, involves Spiderman, Iron Man, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and every major figure in the Marvel universe. And it is an epic story that is going to occupy much of the Marvel universe for the better part of six months.

Here's how the core premise of the series gets described in a recent recap:

After Stamford, Connecticut is destroyed during a televised fight between the New Warriors and a group of dangerous villains, public sentiment turns against super heroes. Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, is attacked outside a nightclub and beaten into a coma. Advocates call for reform and a Superhuman Registration Act is debated, which would require all those possessing paranormal abilities to register with the government, divulge their true identities to the authorities and submit to training and sanctioning in the manner of federal agents. One week later, the Act is passed. Any person with superhuman powers who refuses to register is now a criminal. Some heroes, such as Iron Man, see this as a natural evolution of the role of superheroes in society, and a reasonable request. Others view the Act as an assault on their civil liberties. After being called upon to hunt down heroes in defiance of the Registration Act, Captain America goes underground and begins to form a resistance movement.

Across the Marvel Universe

Normally, I am skeptical about these large scale events that cut across the entire universe of a particularly publishing company which often represent a better marketing strategy than they do storytelling practice. The goal is to get readers buying more books in a given month by dribbling out bits of the story across as many different titles as possible. Yet, Civil War demonstrates to me the power of this mode of expanded storytelling. For one thing, the issues raised by this book are big and they demand a large amount of development if they are not going to be dismissed with some simplistic swat of the hand (this could still happen before everything is over with). But seeing them unfold across close to a hundred issues allows them to be explored with a depth and scope that few other media systems could accommodate.

For another, Civil War exploits this transmedia system's ability to show the same events from multiple characters' points of view and thus to invite us to reread it from conflicting (and self-conflicted) political perspectives. In one book, we may see what an incident means for those, such as Iron Man or Spider-Man or Mr. Fantastic, who are supporting the registration act. In another, we may see it from the perspective of Captain America and the others who are resisting it. in another we may see it from the perspective of the X-Men who are trying to remain neutral or the Thing who seems to be really struggling to do the right thing without any strongly developed political sense. New titles such as Civil War and Frontline have been created to bring together the conflicting perspectives within a single issue. Frontline shows the story from the perspective of two reporters -- Ben Ulrich whose editor wants him to improve their readership by stirring up anger against unregistered superheroes and Sally Floyd whose publisher sees the act as the latest intrusion of the state into the lives of its citizens and who thus has special access to the underground resistance movement. This storyline suggests the degree to which news agencies are shaped by the agendas of their editors and construct different representations of the news -- starting from whom they talk to, what questions they ask, and what ends up getting into print. Marvel has even published a special newsprint edition of the Daily Bugle that shows us how these events play themselves out across all of the different beats in a major newspaper.

This ability to spread the story across all of these different vantage points also increases the likelihood that for at least some readers, their favorite hero ends up on an ideological side different from their own, opening them to listening more closely to the arguments being formed out of sympathy for a character they have invested in for years and years. Finally, given the ways comics publishing works with different books appearing each week, this strategy insures that we live with the Civil War storyline every week for months on end, where-as if it were contained in only one series, we would reconnect with it once a month. (DC has solved this problem with 52, a series that comes out every week but this is regarded as a special event in its own right.) All of this uses the potential of a publisher-wide event to intensify debate and discussion about core issues, such as liberty, privacy, civil disobedience, and the power of the state, that could not be timelier in our current political context.

Comic Books Meet Political Reality

Of course, comic book superheroes, per necessity, deal with these issues at one level removed from our actual political reality -- so much the better if it breaks us out of fixed and partisan categories of analysis and opens us to explore these issues from new points of view. Keep in mind though that Marvel uses many real world references to anchor the stories in our reality so Jonas Jameson is seen getting ready for an appearance on O'Reilly where he will speak out in support of the law and Luke Cage compares the threat of political violence directed against superheroes to what happen to blacks in Mississippi during the civil rights era. Each issue of Civil War ends with a short segment that introduces readers to one or another political debate from world history that offers some parallels to the concerns being discussed -- including one discussion of the relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

And, as reader Tama Leaver notes at his bog, there are strong parallels drawn between what happens to Speedball, one of the young superheroes most centrally involved in the incident, as "an unregistered combatant" and the various prisoners at Gitmo, who have neither been accused of crimes nor treated as war prisoners:

Speedball's experiences have marked similarities with the experiences of 'enemy combatants' (as opposed to prisoners of war) held (illegally) in the US "facilities" in Guantanamo. As Robert Baldwin is carted off to jail, he's told that a purpose-built prison is being constructed to indefinitely hold superhumans who refuse to register and follow government directives, a plot point echoing the 2002 construction of the Camp Delta detainment facility in Guantanamo Bay. While the Civil War story isn't completely black and white--Peter Parker's own deliberations certainly give the pro-registration side a humane voice--the critique of many aspects of the current War on Terror and the illegal detention and torture of untried 'enemy combatants' is bold and blatant on the part of Marvel's storytellers. Personally, I'm heartened by Marvel's stance and hope empathy with their comic book heroes will give readers a moment to think further about politics in the wider world.

Of course, comic book superheroes deal with these issues in somewhat broad strokes -- often through fisticuffs -- and after all, this series, which pits superhero against superhero on every page, is an adolescent fan's wet dream. Comic books have long sought pretexts which allow us to find out (or usually leave unresolved) whether the Thing or the Hulk is stronger. And this series has had some amazing showdowns between Captain America and long-time allies such as Iron Man or Spider-Man. But, the heart of the series has not been about physical violence but about political debates that the characters have had with each other and with themselves. The slugfests include not the usual quips or monologues but an open debate about public policy issues in between hurling the mighty shield or spraying spider gunk. The various members of the Fantastic Four, for example, have been split asunder by these issues -- all the more so since Johnny Storm was a victim of anti-cape violence while Reed Richards has ended up using his simulation models to build the case for the registration act. As Sue Storm Richards protests, this act will mean jail time for "half of our Christmas card list" and creates a series of ethical challenges that make the McCarthy era seem like child's play as the protagonists not only decide whether to reveal their own identities but also whether to name names of their associates and even whether to use force -- even deadly force -- to bring them to jail when they resist the controversial law.

Complicating Our Positions

The book's refusal to offer simple feel-good perspectives on these issues is suggested by these comments by Mark Millar, one of the author's involved, during an interview at Comic Book Resources:

Some readers might be incorrectly try to frame the ideological split in Civil War as Conservative versus Liberal. It's really lazy writing to make everything black and white. I'm a politics buff and I really hate seeing America divided into red and blue states because I know people in red states who have blue opinions. And we're all very complex. No one person can really even be described as a liberal or a conservative. I'm a liberal but I totally believe in the death penalty on occasions. People are more complex than you think and I wanted to do the same thing with superheroes....

The most obvious thing to do would have been to have Captain America as a lap dog of the government. So, I've played around with everyone's personalities a little and really just tried to get in under their skin and have them feeling very confused about it, too. Some of them actually end up changing their minds and crossing sides because it's a very complex issue.

So, to polarize it in terms of Conservative and Liberal would have been a big mistake. And I think you don't want to think of your superheroes as being Liberal or Conservative. I think those guys should be above that. What I've done is made everyone sympathetic, but everyone pretty passionate about what they believe in.

As Millar continues, he makes clear that it would be too neat to read Captain America and his allies as either freedom fighters or terrorists. There is enough moral ambiguity to go around (and we see even some of the most partisan characters -- Spiderman for example -- anguish over the choices they are being forced to make.)

They will be a combination of both reactive and proactive. I didn't want to just have these guys in, say, like a terrorist cell or anything because fundamentally Cap's guys are superheroes. So, the rationale for the Marvel Universe shouldn't be that they're just underground guys who are constantly fighting the forces of the status quo. They've got to be superheroes. They've got to go out and actually fight super villains and, unfortunately, SHIELD and the other superheroes are after them when they're doing so. It's an added tension to the whole thing.

At the end of the day, the book isn't so much taking positions as raising questions that we as a society need to be debating. There has been a tendency in recent years to depict questioning government authorities as somehow unpatriotic or assuming that questions lead inevitably towards one or another partisan conclusion. But I think we are well served when our popular culture asks hard questions and I rejoice when it forces me to rethink my own political investments.

There's so much more that one could say about this series. I had planned to run a whole lot of examples of the political reflections of various partisans here to suggest the range of perspectives we encounter -- including the use of non-American characters like Black Panther or Namor to give us some sense of how the world sees America's political turmoil. But at the end of the day, the power of these speeches lies in their contexts. They mean more if you've read these characters for years, know their personalities and backstories, and can anticipate what some of this means for the future of their series. They mean more if you see them on the pages of a comic book coming out of the mouths of brightly colored superhero characters and realize what a statement it is for Marvel to be telling this particular story in the Summer of 2006.

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Three

Sorry for the wait, oh loyal readers of this here blog. But today, I am finally able to sit down and plow out the third installment of my series about how the comic book world has responded to 9/11 and the on-going War on Terror. Some of you will know that this was inspired by Michael Dean's "The New Patriotism" which was serialized in recent issues of Comics Journal and argued that comics were "circling the wagons" in response to the perceived threat to national security. As Dean puts it, "Now, some 60 years after the height of WWII and some 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, mainstream comics seem to be making tentative gestures toward recreating the glory days of the wartime propaganda comic."

His primary exhibits are Freedom Time Three and Cobb (both from minor publishers), Marvel's Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, and reports that Frank Miller may be doing a Batman vs. Bin Laden book. What Dean has to say about the politics behind these particular projects is fascinating, including some interesting quotes by Cobb's Beau Smith about the politics of comics publishing today:

Like film and TV most think that since it [comics] is a creative community and business that it favors a liberal stance. Creativity has always been closely tied to a liberal base...even taken for granted. That's a mistake. That is what has kept comics in this sales slump for so many years. Most publishers in comics, like movie studios, haven't really cared or taken the time to find out who their consumers really are....I think the less liberal factor is the big silent majority of the comic-book-reading public. I think they are well aware of what is going on in the world and in Iraq. I think they would love to have an escape area where there are solid good guys defeating bad guys. I think people want that outlet to release the steam that has built up since 9/11.

But, I question whether these particular projects -- most of which are published by marginal presses and will never get into most American comics shops -- are somehow representative of a general ideological perspective within the comics industry. In fact, I have been surprised at how few comics have shown us superheroes bopping terrorists and how many of them have encouraged a deep reflection on the nature and ethics of power in the world post-911.

Over the past two installments, I traced the immediate aftermath of September 11 and the varied ways that comics took up the challenge of responding to these events. Today, I want to bring this discussion into the present moment by looking at four books I have been reading this summer (well, really, four storylines) that speak directly to the political upheaval in this country surrounding the Iraq War and issues of Homeland Security: DMZ, Ex Machina, Supreme Squadron, and Marvel's Civil War storyline.

In focusing on these books, I skip over a broader array of representations of the current debates that also might seem very relevant to this discussion, such as Rick Veith's Can't Get No (which I haven't gotten any of yet), Joe Sacco's various projects in using comics to report on life in the middle east, Ted Rall's book on his trip to Afghanistan, cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff's strange fusion of politics and religion in Testament or Art Spigelman's In the Shadows of No Towers which used imagery for early comic strips to reflect on his own conflicting feelings at 9/11.

Part of what I want to suggest here is that individually, comic book writers and artists -- both mainstream and niche -- have used their work to encourage their readers to ask hard questions about contemporary society and that collectively, they have provided a more diverse range of perspectives on these issues than can be found within the mainstream media.

DMZ

DMZ, published by Vertigo, is the work of writer Brain Wood and artist Riccardo Burchelli. Regular readers of this blog will note that this is the third shout out to Wood in the past month -- reflecting on three very different projects, his superhero series (Demo), his reflections on local culture (Local) and now his book depicting a domestic civil war (DMZ). Frankly, I regard Wood to be one of the best writers working in comics today -- someone who has found a way to infuse popular narratives with alternative narrative and political perspectives. DMZ drops a young reporter in training from Liberty Network behind the lines in a war-torn Manhattan. As Wood explains in a Comic Book Resource interview:

Middle America, literally, has risen up out of frustration, anger, and poverty to challenge the government's position of preemptive war and police action throughout the world. It's left America neglected and unattended, and also unprotected, at least from a major threat within its own borders. Then isolationist and religious militias get involved and arm the people, and then it's suddenly the Second American Civil War. They push to the coasts where they're stopped, creating a no-man's-land in Manhattan, with the 'Free Armies' in Jersey facing off against the US Army in Brooklyn....The politics of such a conflict are a little weird," Wood continued. "Initial reactions to the news of this book have made attempts to paint it as a 'liberal ranting against the conservatives,' but that's not actually possible in this scenario. Democrats can be and are every bit as hawkish as Republicans in times of war, and anyway, the two warring groups in 'DMZ' are just extremists fighting extremists. Homegrown insurgents fighting an extremist government regime, and it's the sane, normal people of all political affiliations that are caught in the middle.

Matty, a young journalist in training --raised in sheltered Long Island in a wealthy family, interned with Liberty Networks -- finds himself stranded in the demilitarized zone where he has access to partisans and insurgents of all stripes and becomes their only means of communicating their perspectives to the country at large. The result is a classic story of political awakening. At first, he clings to the simplified version of the war that has been communicated through the national news media but increasingly, what he sees and experiences forces him to rethink the propaganda machine which has shaped public understanding of the conflict.

Wood has described the world he is traveling through as equal parts Escape From New York, Falluja, and New Orleans right after Katrina." He adds:

Manhattan is a city largely abandoned and the people that have stayed are the very poor who had no hope of fleeing on their own or being part of anyone's evacuation plan. A lot of snipers and insurgents have moved in and there are AWOL military who are hiding out. Add to that a whole mess of kooks and crazies and holdouts.

The current storyline, "Body of a Journalist," which has been running for the past few months, is clearly informed by the kidnapping and hostaging of journalists, such as Daniel Pearl, during the current military conflict as Matty becomes a pawn for both sides and ultimately finds himself a target from government forces who want to silence his broadcasts before he becomes too much of an icon of the opposition. Wood has finally taken us deeply into the backstory of the conflict:

The wars were a million miles away. We had troops on the ground in four separate conflicts on three continents. There was never a draft so no one I knew went...I remember when the Free Armies formed a government in Helena. And spread out from there. No one could grasp how it could happen...There was just no one to stop them. The national guard, the ones that were still here, just took off their uniforms and got out of the way....All these guard bases, flush with Homeland Security funding, were pit stops for the Free Armies....Pilots weren't about to bomb small-town America. It all happened so fast that the Pentagon didn't have time to whip up a propaganda campaign to paint the Free Armies as traitors.

As described by Wood, the Free Army resembles some of the forces that have got America is confronting elsewhere in the world "The Free States are an idea, not a geographic entity. The same asymmetrical, insurgent warfare that bogged down the U.S. military oversees is happening here."

His description of what happens to a besieged Manhattan owes a lot to recent experiences in New Orleans. As a survivor tells Matty:

We were supposed to have M.T.A. workers running the subways, Metro-North, L.I.R.R. and the busses to get everyone out, but they all just took off on their own. If you had a car, you were good. If you had money or friends in the right places, you were set. If you were poor, you were fucked. The Army shut the bridges and tunnels down after only four hours. Tough luck. Some people tried to swim or sneak past the roadblocks. They probably didn't make it...I bet you didn't see many refugees in your town, did you?

Wood takes advantage of the power of speculative fiction to transform current events an\d let us look at them with fresh eyes: we are perhaps more open to understanding the motives of an insurgent in a fictional conflict or to question a fictional government authority's motives than we are to ask such hard questions about the actual war. As he noted above, I don't see this book as fitting comfortably within a red state/blue state political structure. If anything, it is about what happens when American politics becomes too polarized and the public becomes too apathetic, allowing extremists of all ideological colors to take over the political debate.

Ex Machina

Imagine this: Mitchell Hundred (also known as the superhero Great Machine) saves thousands of lives during the collapse of the World Trade Center and helps to prevent another terrorist assault on the Brooklyn Bridge. In the aftermath, he emerges as a political symbol and decides to abandon his mask and cape and run for elective office. Campaigning as an independent candidate, he gets elected the Mayor of New York City. Ex Machina moves back and forth between flashbacks that show something of his crime-fighting past and more contemporary scenes which show his struggles to govern a city as complex and politically charged as New York. The Wikipedia entry on the series provides a pretty good summary of the key themes here:

Thematically, Ex Machina can be seen as perhaps an anti-Spider-Man. Spider-Man is a character with super-powers who feels a responsibility to work alone and to use his powers for the good of society while trying to maintain his personal private life separately from his super-hero life. On the other hand, Mayor Hundred has publicly declared that was in fact a super-hero, The Great Machine, and despite pressure from some to return to being a super-hero, he feels that he could do more to aid society as a whole (and his city in particular) if he works from within the system as a public servant rather than outside it as a lone vigilante. While it may be Mayor Hundred's preference that he not have to employ his super-powers in his day-to-day work as the Mayor, he has been shown to be more than willing to use those powers as needed in the course of his duties (and when he gets into various scrapes).

Created by Brian K. Vaughan (known for Y: The Last Man and Runaways, two other favorites on my current pull list), Ex Machina has the feel of a good Aaron Sorkin television drama -- The West Wing in particular -- in its mixture of character drama, political debate, and witty dialogue. Across the run of the series, Hundred has confronted a range of contemporary urban policy issues -- including public funding for the arts, gay marriage, and racial profiling.

A recent storyline, "March to War" depicts what happens when someone releases the toxic chemical Ricin during a march protesting the war in Iraq and Hundred's administration has to deal with the aftermath. In the course of four tautly drawn issues, Vaughan takes us through a range of political perspectives on Homeland Security, including a recurring focus on the need to balance a public hunger for security against our long-standing traditions of civil liberty. The story goes to some lengths to explore how Post-911 politics both complicates and is complicated by the multiracial composition of urban America. Vaughn shows us, for example, a hate crime directed against a Sikh taxi driver by white extremists who were themselves victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center; he shows a heated meeting where various religious leaders gather, including a Rabi who demands that his house of worship get the same police protection as the local Mosques.

Vaughan's characters challenge the idea that national governments are better able to protect citizens during terrorist attacks than local police forces. At one point, his police commissioner explains:

The last time we trusted our defense to the Feds, somebody flew a goddamn plane into one of our buildings...Fuck the Bureau! The entire outfit is half the size of the NYPF. I've got more officers who speak Arabic in one precinct than you guys have in the entire D.O.D. You boys are welcome to finally give us the cash you've been funneling into new hummers for sheriffs in bumfuck, Idaho but I'm not relinquishing jurisdiction to Washington probies who don't know uptown from their....

The Mayor gets into a knock-down drag out with his deputy mayor about the rationale for subway searches and faces an ethical dilemma because his secret powers might allow him to identify the cause of the incident but might result in any evidence he produced being thrown out of court. And there's a really uncomfortable sequence where a man flees the cops at the subway station and gets shot -- not because he was smuggling weapons but because he was carrying a stash of drugs.

Every page pulls us in a slightly different direction, complicates our feelings towards the issue of Homeland Security, as Vaughan introduces yet another perspective or raises another argument and in the process, pulls in most of the established characters and introduces some vividly drawn secondary figures. In Part Two, I suggested that the exploration of 9/11 in comics would ultimately inform how other media dealt with these events: in that light, it is interesting that NewLine has announced plans to turn Ex Machina into a film.

Squadron Supreme

Squadron Supreme was a long-ago comic book series published by Marvel and essentially modeled/plagiarized from DC's Justice League characters: it's not very hard to identify which of these characters is based on Batman, Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, etc. J. Michael Stracynzki (best known for Babylon 5) relaunched this franchise several years ago with the 18-issue Supreme Power series, much of which can now be read retrospectively as character buildup for the newly launched Squadron Supreme series.

If DC's Justice League books have always been marked by a cheery optimism and a great deal of respect for governmental authorities, Stracyznski's Squadron Supreme is marked by a deep distrust of the motives and honesty of the American government. It depicts a world where governments tell truth to their citizens only as a last recourse and where they conspire with major news agencies to spin any information that slips through their tight controls. By the end of the first issue, we see the Squadron Supreme characters with a president who looks remarkably like George W. Here's how the series gets described in the opening text of the latest issue:

The Squadron Supreme is just that. Enlisted by the United States government to protect America's interests at home and abroad, this team of super-powered individuals has been trained to operate with extraordinary force and unified military precision. No quarter given, none asked. Secretly, however, it is comprised of a diverse group of individuals with separate -- sometimes sinister -- agendas.

Straczynski, long noted for his thoughtful genre fiction, has turned a super hero team book, which could have been of the most generic kind, into an ongoing debate about the responsibilities of America as a superpower within a global society. This comic comes as close as any of the examples I'm going to discuss here to scenarios where superheroes battle terrorists but as it does so, it complicates any easy black and white interpretation of what is at stake in those conflicts.

The team's first real mission was to deal with the genocidal General John M'Butu, the dictator of the African province of Salawe, a man possessed by super powers of persuasion who uses them to save his own hide and to manipulate his citizens into keeping him in power. Having dispelled the threat posed by this evil monster, the team members are then confronted by a group of African superheroes who force them to think about their own roles in the conditions faced by the region. They learn that:

It was the Americans who armed M'Butu to rule Uganda, gave him money, told him they would turn a blind eye to any of the unfortunate necessities of war. It profits American interests to see Africa destabilized, lurching from one conflict to another, always fighting among ourselves. You see all of your I.T. work going to India. Nations trading in Chinese currency instead of dollars, Ireland as the new silicon valley, America cannot afford a peaceful, united Africa with a growing economy. But then your people discovered that M'Butu was special, that he had the power to do what they feared -- he could win. To win defeats the notion of continued strife. He could become a power that would rise to challenge you.

They tell the superheroes that they have been yet another pawn in an international struggle and that they could have done nothing constructive in Africa since they are implicated in the systems and practices that continue to destabilize that part of the world. It is a perspective on America's role in the developing world that is rarely shown anywhere in our media -- let alone in a Marvel comic book.

Their second mission takes this critique of American foreign policy even further: the team is sent to dispatch insurgents in an unspecified middle eastern country and here, we see American superheroes literally wipe the desert with Arab military men. Emil Burbank, perhaps the most brutal and amoral member of the team, commits atrocities, slaughtering men who have already surrendered in violation of the Geneva Accords and frags his own attaché when he questions his actions. What follows is a thoughtful debate about what happens when one country becomes so powerful that it faces no meaningful resistance from its enemies. Blur, the African-American counterpart of the Flash, has serious questions about what has happened: "Doesn't what we're doing here bother anybody other than me? I mean, those guys we're fighting don't even have a chance. Does that seem right to anybody?" And Burbank sneers back:

If you want to give them a chance to kill you, all you have to do is slow down. War is always predicated upon who has the best toys. Did the native Americans have a chance against the greater technology the settlers brought with them from the old world....War is the implementation of policy by other means. We are that means...We can cut a swath across any country, same as we're doing right here.

Burbank, however, has little interest in simply submitting to any governmental authority -- including the agency which employs him -- speculating on what would stop such super powers from dominating the world. The others are horrified by this blunt assertion of their power -- power which is unrestrained by any greater civic responsibility. Yet it is pretty clear that Straczynski intends Burbank to stand in for the unilateralism in our current national policy. While the book stops short of pure agitprop, it does seem to be using superheroes to invite us to think about what it means for America to be a superpower that inserts itself into world-wide conflicts and demonstrates a power unrivaled by any other country.

I will be back soon with what I expect will be the final installment of this series, dealing with the current Civil War plotline, which is reshaping the Marvel universe this summer and reflecting on the shared themes across all four of these books.

Ivan Went to Comicon and All I Got Was This Lousy Photograph of T-Shirts

202152816_96a639c934.jpg The title says it all. I've been wanting to go to Comicon for years now but once again, I didn't get to go. I sent Comparative Media Studies graduate student Ivan Askwith to be my eyes and ears at this event. This is the first of an unspecified number of blog posts he's writing about his experiences there.

Here's what he had to report:

Since this was the first year that I've been able to attend ComicCon, I have no strong basis of comparison to describe how the event has changed over time.

From the "Copy Points" briefing I was given at the press registration table, I can tell you that:

- This year marked the 37th annual ComicCon

- ComicCon is the largest comic book and pop culture event in North America

- ComicCon 2006 featured over 600 hours of programming and discussion panels.

- The first ComicCon drew together 300 attendees in the basement of a San Diego hotel.

- The 2005 ComicCon drew about 104,000 attendees.

- The largest presentation hall is a converted exhibit hall which seats 6,500 people.

Since I was attending on Henry's behalf, however, I was interested in seeing how ComicCon might illustrate some of the themes and trends addressed in the forthcoming Convergence Culture. As anyone who has been to ComicCon could tell you, I wasn't disappointed: over three days, I spent more than 40 hours talking with fans, attending panel discussions and content previews, browsing a massive hall packed with more collectible merchandise than I could have imagined, and chatting with reps from some of the most popular exhibition booths.

Trade press estimates suggest that more than 140,000 people attended this year's Con.

So after three exhausting days, and almost a week to reflect and recuperate, let me share a few of my most significant observations and conclusions from attending the San Diego ComicCon.

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As I've already mentioned, this was my first time at ComicCon, so I'm not in the best position to describe how the event has changed, in tone or content, since it began in 1970.

If I were going to speculate, however, I'd guess that ComicCon began as a fan-centric event, an annual cult gathering where fans could engage and interact with other fans from around the world who shared their particular passion, while meeting some of the artists or creative minds responsible for their objects of appreciation.

Thirty-seven years later, it has turned into something quite different: above all, ComicCon struck me as a perfect setting for Hollywood cool hunters seeking "the next big [marketable] thing," and for entertainment marketers trying to create the diehard fan base needed to make their products the next big thing. More on this in a moment.

Watching people move around the floor in the Convention Center, it was relatively easy to break the attendees into a few distinct (but by no means comprehensive or exclusive) categories:

Most obvious are the spectators, most of them presumably from the San Diego area, who attend for the pure spectacle of the event, but don't demonstrate a strong affiliation with any of the properties or franchises present. For spectators, the panels and exhibitors are fun, but the real draw of the event seems to be the general craziness of the most committed fans and attendees. Spectators don't tend to seek out any particular booth or scheduled event; instead, they mostly wander the floor -- often with children or significant others in tow -- stopping to stand in line only if there's a hot piece of free swag waiting at the front of it.

Then there are the casual enthusiasts, fans who are familiar with (and vocally appreciative of) several shows, comics, or characters. Enthusiasts might wear clothes with affiliation logos on them, but they won't be in full costume -- which is to say that enthusiasts are fans who demonstrate a socially acceptable level of enthusiasm about the objects of their fandom. They might have all of the issues of a particular comic, or own all of the DVDs for a particular show, and their friends might even roll their eyes when they advocate on behalf of their fandom, but by and large, enthusiasts still consider themselves "normal."

And then, of course, there are the hardcore fans. These are the fans who have an obsessive level of knowledge about their active fandoms; who immediately recognize the usually anonymous producers, writers, colorists and illustrators responsible for their favorite shows or comics; who dress up in elaborate handmade costumes, often in small clans; who will get in line at 4 AM to secure front-row seats to an hour-long panel held at 2 PM; who are often extremely vocal in their appreciation or enthusiasm , and so knowledgeable in arcane details that the creators of their obsessions sometimes seem alarmed.

At their most extreme, these are the fans that William Shatner was thinking of when he told an audience member at a Star Trek Convention that he should "get a life" -- but as many marketers have started to learn, the hardcore fan minority can also be the difference between the success and failure of new properties.

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This brings us back to the Convention itself, and my initial suspicion that there has been a discernible shift in ComicCon's function over the last several years.

The most obvious manifestation of this shift is in the event schedule itself: while many of the smaller panel discussions still feature independent artists, fan-favorite illustrators, and small time cult creators, the largest sessions -- held in auditoriums with capacities ranging from 2000-6500 -- are now showcase sales pitches from the major film studios, comics distributors, publishers and television networks.

The traditional notion of ComicCon as a gathering for pale-skinned geeks and science-fiction nerds seems to be crumbling, giving way to a new notion of ComicCon as a giant pitch session, where marketers and celebrities court the often-skeptical fan market in an attempt to win their approval and support.

Or, to place this in the larger context of Henry's work on convergence: culture producers have finally started to grasp the vital role of fans as a central engine in the new entertainment economy.

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part Two

Responding to recent essays in The American Prospect and Comics Journal which link comic books to the Bush Administration's foreign policy, I have been running some segments from an essay I published in the recent book, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11. about the ways the comics industry responded to 9/11. A central theme here is to suggest that the representation of the War on Terror in American mainstream comics has been more ambivalent and complicated than most people who don't read comics might have imagined. While there have been some images of superheroes bopping terrorists, there have been fewer of these images that you might imagine. Yesterday, I walked through the tribute books produced immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center and the ways that Spider-man, Superman, and Captain America were used as vehicles to ask some hard questions about the costs of war. Today, I want to pick up where I left off with some reflections on the shift in the conception of the heroic in comics during the immediate post-9/11 period.

Rethinking the Hero After 9/11

Building on public interest in emergency workers, Marvel launched three new titles - The Precinct about cops, The Brotherhood about firemen, and the Wagon about an ambulance driver - which collectively formed the Call of Duty series. Lest anyone miss the point, "911" was embedded in their logos. Of these new series, The Brotherhood was the most fully grounded in ethnographic detail -- the tools of the trade, the hazards of putting out blazes, and the comradery of the firehouse. The opening issue makes vivid use of reds, oranges, and yellows, bringing us into the perspective of a firefighter making his way through a burning building in search of survivors. The stories construct these characters with surprising nuance and realism, dealing with their frazzled finances, their estranged relationships, their professional disillusionment, and their depression after watching so many friends die at the WTC. The interweaving of the characters and plots across the three series proved an effective means of examining the collaboration between police, fire, and medical workers. Yet, Marvel never fully trusted itself to build reader interest in ordinary heroes, adding supernatural and science fiction elements to the mix. The characters confront the ghostly figure of a young girl who has been sent back in time by her grieving father to warn of a forthcoming terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty that had claimed the lives of his wife and sons. They also must deal with a strange cult that distributes what one character calls "cellular napalm," turning junkies into human bombs that can be detonated on demand.

Searching for a different kind of hero, Paul Chadwick's "Sacrifice" documents what we know about the uprising on the Pennsylvania flight. Chadwick takes us behind the scenes showing us images that couldn't be seen on television, but could only be reconstructed after the fact. We watch the passengers compile information from their cell phone conversations, hatched a plan, and give their lives trying to insure that the plane never reached its target. Chadwick shows us knife blades slashing through the seat cushions the passengers use as shields and the struggle in the cockpit as they overpower the highjackers. Chadwick often uses his self-published comics, which deal with a self-doubting superhero, Concrete, as vehicles for exploring what communities can accomplish when they work towards a common cause. One of Chadwick's earlier Concrete stories had offered a painfully complex account of environmental terrorism, questioning the human costs of spiking trees but ultimately not rejecting such tactics. Here, he celebrates the passengers' willingness to sacrifice their own lives rather than allow innocents to suffer, a trait that distinguishes them from the terrorists they defeat.

What Chadwick takes several pages to do, Marvel's Igor Kordey accomplishes in a single image. Kordey was born in Croatia and fought in the Balkan wars, before moving to Canada with his wife and children, hoping to escape the destruction he had seen around him. Kordey was the only artist in Heroes who directly depicts the terrorists and he chose to do so in a morally complex fashion. As Quesada explained, "He knows what it's like to live in war, and he doesn't want to sweep anything under the carpet." The image is framed over the shoulders of the panic-striking terrorists who are clustered together as passengers come storming up the aisles. It is a haunting image because Kordey invites us to see the events from the terrorist's perspectives and encourages us to dwell for a moment on their vulnerability and humanity.

Why Comics Matter...

Utopian rhetoric can seem, on first blush, naïve, yet what it establishes is a set of ideals or standards against which the limits of the present moment can be mapped and a set of blueprints through which a future political culture might be constructed. In this process, the comics are perhaps little more than a relay system, communicating messages from one community to another, taking ideas out of the counterculture and transmitting them into the mainstream. We can see this process occurring in several stages - first, the movement of ideas from counterculture into comics-culture (itself fringe, but defined around patterns of consumption rather than political ideologies). Here, the fusion of alternative and mainstream publishers meant ideas that once circulated among the most politically committed now reach readers who would not otherwise have encountered them. As such, these comics do important cultural work, translating the abstract categories of political debate and cultural theory into vivid and emotionally compelling images.

As the market responds to these ideas, they become more deeply embedded within the genres that constitute the bulk of contemporary comics publishing. Much as the depression, the Second War II, and Vietnam left lasting imprints on the superhero genres, giving rise to new characters, plots, and themes which were mined by subsequent generations, September 11 shows signs of altering the way the genre operates. As I am writing this essay (Late 2002), the tribute books have just now moved into the remainder bins at my local comics shop and every month seems to bring new projects which in one way or another have been shaped by the political climate of Post-9/11 America. The comics industry still seems to be engaged in an extended process of self-examination, still questioning their longstanding genre traditions, pondering the nature of the heroic and of evil, reinventing their hero's missions for a new political landscape, and trying to figure out how to absorb the realism and topicality of alternative comics into mainstream entertainment. Some titles, like Captain America, are permanently altered. Cassaday and Reiber are still circling around issues of guilt and responsibility. A new miniseries, Truth, uses Captain America to re-examine the racism that shaped the experience of American GIs during World War II, suggesting eerie parallels between the "super soldier" serum tests that created Captain America and the experiments at Tuskegee Institute; and includes the astonishing image of the American army systematically slaughtering hundreds of African-Americans in order to protect their secrets. Other books have gone back to business as usual. In The Ultimates, Captain America, Giant Man, Wasp Woman, and Thor smash half of Manhattan, demolishing Grand Central Station, all because Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk when he gets jealous that his girlfriend was going out with Freddie Prince Jr. One would describe the book as totally untouched by 9/11 if the artist didn't draw so heavily on what we had learned about what happens when real world skyscrapers come crashing down. These shifts do not need to be uniformly felt across all comics to make a difference. Not all superhero comics -- not even all mainstream titles -- embrace the same ideologies, tell the same stories, and represent the world in the same terms. But, enough creative artists from enough different sectors of the industry have been impacted by September 11 that these influences will be felt across a range of different titles for some time to come.

The long-term impact of September 11 can also be seen in the emergence of new comic book series that celebrate the heroism of average citizens. For example, Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, which Wildstorm, a smaller independent press, launched in Fall 2002, depicts a multiracial, multinational organization of ordinary people who contribute their services on an ad hoc basis. Ellis rejects the mighty demigods and elite groups of the superhero tradition and instead depicts the twenty-first century equivalent of a volunteer fire department. Ellis has stated that the series grew out of his frustration with the hunger for paternalism expressed by superhero fans in the wake of September 11, his pride in the civilian resistance aboard the Pensylvania-bound aircraft, and his fascination with the emerging concept of the "smart mob" - a self-organized group who use the resources of information technology to coordinate their decentralized actions. As Ellis explains, "Global Frequency is about us saving ourselves." Each issue focuses on a different set of characters in a different location, examining what it means for Global Frequency members personally and professionally to contribute their labor to a cause larger than themselves. Once they are called into action, most of the key decisions get made on site as the volunteers act on localized knowledge. Most of the challenges come, appropriately enough, from the debris left behind by the collapse of the military-industrial complex and the end of the cold war--"The bad mad things in the dark that the public never found out about." In other words, the citizen solders use distributed knowledge to overcome the dangers of government secrecy.

The next step is what happens if and when these changes get absorbed into the mainstream of the entertainment industry. Comics function today as a testing ground for new themes and stories for the rest of mass media. Hollywood or network television are not likely to absorb the specific stories which emerged in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but in so far as those changes get felt in the underlying logic through which the comic book industry operates, in so far as those changes get institutionalized within the conventions of the superhero genre, then they will likely have an influence on the films and television series that emerge over the next few years. One could, for example, compare this reassessment of the heroic in comics to the revision of the superhero genre which took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in a darker, more angsty, more psychologically complex, more physically vulnerable conception of the hero. This rethinking of the superhero impacted not only future comic books but can be seen at work, albeit in a somewhat watered down form, in the big screen adaptations of Batman, Spiderman, and Daredevil. There, the influence is apt to be more implicit than explicit, a shift in tone or the "structure of feeling" as much or more than a shift in ideology.

Let's be clear, though, that superheroes don't have to conquer the world for the political expressions we've discussed here to make a difference. What they do in their own space, in their own communities, matters. Popular culture is the space of dreams, fantasies, and emotions. In that space, it matters enormously whether Captain America stands for fascism or democracy, whether Wonder Woman represents the strong arm of American cultural imperialism or whether she respects and understands third world critiques of her mission, whether Superman is more important than the average men and women who are accidental casualties of his power struggles, or whether everyday people have the power to solve their problems without turning to superheroes for help. It is important to remember, from time to time, that popular culture is not univocal; that it remains a space of contestation and debate; that it often expresses messages which run counter to dominant sentiment within the culture; and that it often opens up space for imagining alternatives to the prevailing political realities. It is also worth remembering that people working within the cultural industries exert an active agency in shaping the ideas which circulate within popular culture and that on occasion, they may act out of political ideals rather than economic agendas.

Coming Soon: How current comics are dealing with the War on Terror

Comic Book Foreign Policy? Part One

The online edition of The American Prospect published an article comparing the Bush administration's current policy in the Middle East to comic books -- specifically, to the Green Lantern Corps. Here's what they had to say:

The trouble is that a broad swathe of hawkish opinion, taking in most conservatives and a tragically large number of liberals, have bought into a comic book view of how international relations works.

I refer, of course, to the Green Lantern Corps, DC Comics' interstellar police force assembled by the Guardians of Oa. Here's how the Corps works: Each member is equipped with a power ring, the ultimate weapon in the universe. The ring makes green stuff -- energy blasts, force fields, protective bubbles, giant hammers, elephants, chairs, cute rabbits, whatever -- under the control of the bearer. When it's fully charged, the only limits to the ring's power (besides the proviso that the stuff must be green) are the user's will and imagination. Historically, the rings couldn't affect yellow objects, but in recent years it's been revealed that this was the "parallax fear anomaly" (don't ask) and that the problem could be overcome by overcoming fear -- which is to say, with more willpower.

This is an OK premise for a comic book. Sadly, it's a piss-poor premise for a foreign policy.

Without getting into the specifics of Bush's current foreign policy (or for that matter, the current run of Green Lantern), this statement seems grossly unfair -- to comic books. I understand why Bush's world view full of its talk about capturing "evil-Doers" who are hell-bent on destroying the "American way of life" reminds some people of comic book superheroes -- it is colorful, broadly drawn, larger than life, and sometimes a little punch-drunk. But the reality is that contemporary comic books have offered a much more nuanced depiction of our current political realities and have adopted a pretty consistently progressive framing of these events than The American Prospect and its readers might imagine.

The American Prospect is not the only publication that has recently taken on comic books as a site for current foreign policy debates. Comics Journal (a publication which has never missed an opportunity to express criticism of mainstream comics) has been running a two part series by Michael Dean about the ways comics responded to 9/11 and its aftermath. You can see a small sample of what they have to say here:

The first part of this report noted a developing trend toward comics with a "superpatriotic" theme, setting square-jawed American heroes and superheroes on the trail of Osama bin Laden and other terrorists -- most notably Frank Miller's much-publicized plans for a Batman-versus-bin Laden showdown. Miller told the press that there was once again a need for the archetypal satisfactions of the classic 1940s wartime propaganda comic. The cover of Tightlip Entertainment's May-shipping comic, Freedom Three #1, is a recreation of the Captain America #1 cover showing the red-white-and-blue hero punching Hitler with Captain America replaced by one of the Freedom Three and bin Laden substituting for Hitler as the punchee. Fantasy tableaux of superheroic vengeance directed against demonic terrorist icons clearly offer a degree of gratification to comics readers today.

Dean does some interesting reporting here, arguing that ideas from conservative think tanks are finding their ways into some contemporary comics though his focus is on a small handful of examples that may not be representative of current industry practice as a whole. It is true, for example, that Marvel worked with former embedded journalist Karl Zinsmeister to produce Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq, but that same publisher also launched a new 411 series which first hit the shelf in April 2003 even as American troops were marching into Baghdad. Taking its name from an old telecommunications code for information, the series expresses a belief that it is important to inform the public about alternatives to war and violence. As Marvel President Bill Jemas explained, "411 is about peacemakers: people who make sacrifices in the name of humanity. These are people willing to die to keep all of us - on all sides - alive... But the theme of sacrifice for the sake of peace, for the sake of all of humanity, is hard for many Americans to accept right now, with the hearts and minds of the body politics rising in a patriotic furor... These stories are neither anti-American nor anti-Iraqi, not anti-French, nor anti-Israeli. 411 is pro-human." Opening with an essay on "Understanding the Culture of Nonviolence" written by Mahanda Gandhi's grandson, the series included contributions by Tony Kushner (Angels in America), longtime anti-nuke activist Helen Caldicott and political cartoonist David Rees. Marvel's overt engagement with the antiwar movement was certainly rare among American corporations. How do we decide which book is more representative of Marvel's response to the War on Terror?

So, I think Dean may oversimplify a much more complex history of the ways that the comics industry has responded to American foreign policy since 9/11. As it happens, I recently published an essay on this topic, "Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears," which can be found in the book, Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11. Here, I am going to lay out some of my key arguments from that essay. I will be back soon with an update suggesting how some more recent comics -- mainstream and midstream -- have tackled the long-term consequences of the war on terrorism upon American society.

Comics and War: A Brief History

The first thing that should strike anyone who has been reading mainstream comics over the past few years is how few of the kind of images Dean is describing we have actually seen. Witness the fact that he has to go to a bargain row publisher --Tightlip Entertainment -- to find an example extreme enough to illustrate his point.

Of course, we have to keep in mind that these images of superheros tackling the enemy were most common during World War II. Today, it is easy to read such images as simply hawkish and blood thirsty but read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay book (one of my all time favorite novels), and you get a better sense of the cultural context in which those first wave of images were produced. Chabon suggests that the superheroes were, in a term which Joseph McCarthy would use against progressive, "prematurely antifascist." That is to say, they were battling Nazis before an isolationist country was ready to join the fight. And their early anti-Nazi stance reflected the significant number of Jewish writers, artists, and editors working in the comics book industry during that period.

Comics have shown a great deal more ambivalence towards other armed conflicts. One need only cite for example the dark and gloomy images of the Korean War found in Harvey Kurtzman's Two Fisted Tails or the thorough critique of American culture in the midst of the Vietnam War found in Neal Adam and Denny O'Neil's Green Lantern/Green Arrow series. It may be true that the most aggressive anti-war sentiments emerged through the underground comics of the 1960s which had split from the mainstream precisely so that they could be more outspoken in their critique of American society but we have seen in recent years a growing reintegration between mainstream and indie impulses in American comics, an integration that came to a head in the wake of 9/11. What follows are some excerpts from my published essay on this topic.

The Tribute Books

Post September 11, there were some remarkable collaborations between mainstream and alternative publishers which were only possible, because the artists, writers, and publishers knew each other, have worked together in the past, and had discovered compelling reasons to pool their efforts. Artists who have spent their lifetime producing superhero stories found themselves, for the first time in some cases, exploring autobiographical or real world themes, much as alternative comics creators were introducing new themes into the superhero genre.

We really cannot understand how American media responded to September 11 from an institutional perspective alone. This was deeply personal.

Manhattan has historically been the base of operations for the mainstream publishers. The corporate headquarters of DC and Marvel are within a few miles of ground zero. Some of their employees lost friends and family. Some found themselves, for whatever reason, in the general vicinity of the WTC as the towers collapsed. Marvel felt especially implicated since its stories had always been set in New York City, not some imaginary Metropolis. Captain America, Spiderman, Daredevil, The Fantastic Four live in brownstones or sky-rise apartments; they take the subway; they watch games at Yankee Stadium; they swing past the World Trade Center (or at least, they used to do so); they help out Mayor Giuliani.

These companies saw publishing comic books to raise money for the relief effort as "our way of lifting bricks and mortar" - using their skills and labor to make a difference. Marvel published a series of September 11 themed books, including Heroes, which billed itself "The World's Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World's Greatest Heroes," and Moment of Silence, which featured more or less wordless stories depicting the real life experiences of people who gave their lives or miraculously survived the events of September 11. DC, joined forces with Dark Horse, Image, Chaos!, Oni, Top Shelf, and several other smaller presses to produce two volumes, 9-11: The World's Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember and the more modestly titled 9-11: Artists Respond.

Many of the alternative or independent comic artists also lived in or around Manhattan, participating in the New York underground arts scene. The Small Press Expo, one of the major showcases for alternative comics and a central source of their income, was being held in Bethesda and thus got caught up in the panic that hit Washington, DC following the Pentagon attack. Jeff Mason, publisher of Alternative Comics, organized a benefit project, 9-11: Emergency Relief, which brought together some of the top independent and underground comics artists. In all of these projects, the artists donated their time and labor; the printers donated ink and paper; the distributors waived their usual fees; and the publisher contributed their proceeds to groups like the Red Cross. Many comic shops and patrons saw purchasing these books as their way to show their support. Several New York galleries displayed and sold artwork from these projects. These projects drew tremendous interest from readers. On the chart of 2002 best-selling graphic novels, the 9-11 tribute books held first and second place, Emergency Relief held 20th position, and Marvel's Moment of Silence ranked 15th in the list of top-selling single issues for the year.

Comparing the goals editors set for these various projects suggests the very different ideological climates shaping mainstream and alternative comics. Here's Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason: "I am really shocked and dismayed by some of the rhetoric and behavior I've seen from some in the guise of patriotism and I think that a book that promotes an alternative to xenophobia and antagonism would be a good thing." And here's DC Publisher Paul Levitz: "We aspire to use comics to reach people; to tell tales of heroism and the ability of the human spirit to triumph over adversity; to extol the unique virtues of the American dream, and its inclusive way of life; to recall that the price of liberty is high." Levitz reaffirms what he sees as the American spirit, Mason critiques prevailing values and assumptions.

To some degree, those different political agendas are reflected in the books themselves, but less than one might imagine, since mainstream and alternative creators contributed to both projects and since most of the contents could be loosely described as progressive. A few of the submitted pieces are out and out reactionary: one of the Heroes posters depicts the Hulk, his green muscles bulging, waving an American flag as fighter jets fly overhead, bound for Afghanistan, with the slogan, "Strongest One There Is." Adopting a similar theme, Beau Smith imagines the thoughts of a Reservist, helping emergency workers today, off to fight tomorrow: "This isn't my grandfather's war. This is a war of rats. There's only one way to hunt rats that bite and then scurry off into dark holes. You send rat terriers into those holes after them, and they don't come out until all of the rats are dead. We are those rat terriers." Yet, these militaristic images might exist, side by side, with something like Pat Moriarity's caricature of Uncle Sam, praying on bent knee, "Dear God, Allah, supreme spaceman, great pumpkin, whoever you are - please stop the cycle of hatred!" One would be hard pressed to see such ideological diversity anywhere else in an increasingly polarized and partisan American media.

A Job For Superman?

Time's Andrew D. Arnold summarized concerns that dogged the various projects: "For some this will come across as a gross commodification and trivialization of an awesome, unspeakable tragedy. These characters are arguably more corporate icons than meaningful characters - like seeing Ronald McDonald and the Keebler Elves giving succor to victim's families." Often, Superman or Spiderman function as brand icons circulating with little or no narrative context, deployed in cross-promotions with fast food restaurants, amusement parks, soft drinks, and breakfast cereals. For those only peripherally aware of comics, this may be all they are. Yet, for regular readers, these characters have greater depth and resonance than almost any other figures in American popular culture. The most successful comic book franchises have been in more or less continuous publication since the 1930s and 1940s; their protagonists have become both vivid personalities with complex histories and powerful symbols with heavily encrusted meanings.

For some, superhero comics hark back to simpler times and get consumed as comfort food. Yet, several decades of revisionist comics have questioned and rethought the superhero myth and its underlying assumptions. Shortly after 9/11, Silver Age artist Jim Steranko offered a blistering rebuke of revisionist superhero creators, calling them "cultural terrorists" who had chipped away at national monuments until nothing of substance was left. The result was a flame war that almost ripped the comics community apart. Nobody ever made that same kind of emotional investment in the Keebler Elves.

As comic book artists and writers re-examined these familiar characters in the wake of September 11, they became powerful vehicles for re-examining America's place in the world. When, for example, Frank Miller depicts Captain America's shattered shield, which we once naively believed to be indestructible, he provides a powerful image of the ways the attacks had demolished America's sense of invincibility. When J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita Jr. depict Spiderman clutching a young boy who has just seen his father's body carried away from the WTC wreckage, they evoke Spiderman's own origins (where his unresolved guilt over the murder of his Uncle Ben motivates his endless war against crime). But he does more than that. It seems to be one of the great unwritten rules of comics that superheroes are orphans and that the moment of truth that makes or breaks them is the moment when their innocence is first violated. Most comic characters - good guys and villains - go through a crucible of pain and suffering; what matters is what they make of themselves in the face of adversity. Read through these genre conventions, the suffering child embodies the choices the nation must make as it works through its grief process and defines its mission for the future. When Straczynski and Romita depict Doc Octopus, Doctor Doom, or the Kingpin, lending their resources to the relief effort, they evoke real world political realignments and moral reawakening: "Even those we thought our enemies are here because some things surpass rivalries and borders." When Straczynski and Romita depict a perplexed Spiderman looking upon the pain-stricken Captain America, they connect the events of September 11 with a much larger history of struggles against fascism and terror. The two characters embody the perspectives of two different generations - Captain America, the product of the Second World War, Spiderman, a product of the early 1960s (though portrayed here as a contemporary teen and thus made to embody the current generation of youth).

Comic book artists rejected fisticuffs or vigilante justice in favor of depicting the superheroes as nurturers and healers. They are more likely to be standing tall against domestic racial violence than punching out terrorists. In a Static Shock story, Dwayne McDuffie depicts the African-American superhero and his girl friend sitting in a coffee shop, discussing when and where military response to the attacks might be justifiable. If he knew who was responsible, Static Shock says he might use his superpowers to "take the bastards out myself," but should one attack a nation for the actions of a few individuals. Using criminal mastermind Lex Luthor as an example, he asks, "What if to get Luthor I had to kill some of his family? Or some of the people who live nearby? Or not so near? There's a line there. I'm not sure where to draw it." Virgil doesn't trust himself to do the right thing and he trusts the government even less. The philosophical debate gets disrupted by flag-waving, baseball-bat yielding youth who smash through the shop's window and threaten its Arab-American owner: "Pearl Harbor yesterdays, Kristallnacht today." In a rhetorical move that mirrors the Popular Front's attempts to link Fascism abroad with struggles against segregation in the States, Static Shock learns that his fight isn't overseas but in his own community.

Geoff John's "A Burning Hate" uses superhero comics to defuse the tensions between native-born and immigrant school kids, reminding readers that DC's Justice League of America is full of "foreigners" - Superman from Metropolis, the Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman from Paradise Island, and Aquaman from Atlantis. The superhero mythos was defined, in large part, by the sons of immigrants working through conflicting investments in assimilation and ethnic pride. DC Superheroes almost always come from elsewhere but they have chosen to be defenders of the American dream; sometimes they blend in, trying to pass as mild-mannered reporters, sometimes they stand out, wearing their colors on their chest.

Comic book artists, from Jack Kirby to Todd McFarland, love to draw splash-pages or whole books full of nothing but bone-crushing, muscle-stretching, building-shattering, fist-flying, slobber-knocking action. Troubled by that legacy, Superman: Day of Doom returns to one of the most controversial chapters in the genre's history - the much hyped death and resurrection of Superman following a world-shattering battle with Doomsday. In November 1992, DC had announced the death of Superman, only to bring him back from the dead some months later. Following September 11, DC asked its original author, Dan Jurgens, to revisit this landmark event in the Superman franchise. In the earlier story, the civilian populations had been simply extras in an epic battle between two superpowers. The Post-9/11 Day of Doom made their loss, fear, and suffering its focal point. Paralleling Jurgens's own reassessment of the earlier series, Daily Planet reporter Ty Duffy is assigned the task to write a report re-examining those traumatic events some years later. Publisher Perry White evokes the wide-spread assertion that September 11 took away the perception of America's indestructibility as he summarizes what Superman's death meant to Metropolis: "Superman had done so much. Conquered so many dangers... that we took him for granted. So long as he was around, I think we considered ourselves invincible. When he died, we all lost something precious...If a superman could die, how could any of us feel safe?" As the story continues, Duffy shifts his investigation away from the Man of Steel and onto the civilians who got caught in the crossfire. Clark Kent scans through old microfilms with tears in his eyes, realizing for the first time how many people died when Superman wasn't there. Yet, Kent is sobered up by a new threat that is terrorizing Metropolis - the "Remnant." A kind of crazed victims rights advocate or perhaps an embodiment of Kent's survivor guilt, The Remnant challenges Superman to justify his own existence when so many others have died: "I am the memory of what you did. A ghost of tragedies past. A remnant of the chaos you heaped upon the world... The drifting wind that hears the moans of the forgotten. I do this for them." Superman, like his readers, must confront the consequences of mass destruction and wrestle with the complex range of emotion it provokes.

What Would Captain America Do?

Captain America was probably the superhero title most directly impacted by 9/11. John Cassaday, the book's primary artist, was on the pier just blocks from his upper west side apartment when the towers fell: "The streets were gray, all covered in dust. So were the people. Gray like ghosts." These impressions inspired the comic book's style and imagery. The first pages of his post-9/11 story are sparse in text and drained of color. The opening image shows the shadow of an airplane flying across the clouds, then rows of passengers inside, and finally an extreme close-up of a box cutter blade: "It doesn't matter where you thought you were going today. You're part of the bomb now." The Cap first appears several pages later, a blurry figure making his way across a colorless wasteland. Cassaday under-saturates his costume as if we were looking at it through a cloud of dust. Only in the book's final moments, when Cap resolves to take his fight to the enemy, do we see anything like his familiar red, white, and blue. Cassaday does the entire comic in shades of gray and tan.

His collaborator, John Ney Rieber, almost pulled out of the project after September 11, wanting no part of jingoistic militarism. He agreed to continue only if he could use the book to ask some hard questions about America's culpability in bloodshed around the world: "I don't know how you could write Captain America if you weren't interested in writing about America. I feel very strongly that Cap should be about the rough questions.... If it weren't controversial, if it were only fulfilling people's expectations or making them comfortable - I'd feel as though I'd let Cap Down. I'd be ashamed." The resulting series sets up a strong contrast between its retro-style covers strongly influenced by World War II recruitment posters and the stories inside which interrogate such patriotic rhetoric. When his commander, Nick Fury, orders him to head for Kandahar he refuses, saying that he has responsibilities at home helping the relief effort and battling hate crimes. Captain America was, in effect, created by the U.S. military during the Second World War. Military research developed a super serum that turned a somewhat weakly recruit into a mighty fighting machine. As Cap explains, he's "military technology." He has spent his career following orders and fighting wars. Now, he refuses to go into the trenches until he has answers to the questions that haunt him. Fury urges him not to pursue his investigation, but Cap refuses: "I'm here to protect the people and the dream, not your secrets."

By the time the series gives the Cap someone he can fight, terrorists have taken command of a small town some 200 miles into the American heartland, strewing landmines in the streets and holding hostages in a church. Centerville is far from an innocent community; the factories where the men work make landmines and cluster bombs or as one man insists in the face of his wife's moral scrutiny, "component parts." Every attempt to draw a clear distinction between America's global mission and terrorism proves futile. When the Cap tells the terrorist leader that America doesn't make war on children, Al-Tarq points to the men under his command, "Tell our children, then, American, who sowed death in their fields and left it for the innocent to harvest? Who took their hands? Their feet?"

After recapturing Centerville, the Cap discovers that the terrorists are wearing a high tech identification system being implemented by S.H.I.E.L.D., the American special ops force. Echoing the real world relations between Bin Laden and the U.S. intelligence community, the American government may be more involved with these terrorists than it wants to admit. Clues force him to retrace his own steps, returning to Dresden where he had fought some of his first battles. As he wanders among what remains of the old section of the city, Cap ponders the firebombing that occurred here half a century earlier: "You didn't understand what we'd done here until September 11...These people weren't soldiers. They huddled in the dark. Trapped. While the fire raged above them." Rieber never allows him to escape his personal responsibility and political culpability for the horrific acts his government had executed. He has been their tool and their apologist; now, he must face the truth. The terrorist leader offers to turn himself over if he can answer a simple question: "Guerrillas gunned my father down while he was at work in the fields. With American bullets. American weapons. Where am I from? ...My mother was interrogated and shot. Our home was burned....You know your history, Captain America. Tell your monster where he's from." And it is clear from the Cap's pained expression that he recognizes that this story could be told over and over in countless parts of the world. He protests that these were the actions of a government that acted outside public knowledge and without democratic authorization. But, how could he be fighting to make the world safe for Democracy and defend a government that was hiding the truth from its own people? In the end, Captain America murders his antagonist in cold blood, recognizing as he does so that there is no way to wash his hands clean of his past actions.

MORE TO COME

Pink Pigs and Other Local Knowledge

My references earlier this week to Brian Wood's Demo inspired me to reread something I wrote in January about his new project, Local. This is excerpted from an essay that will run in a forthcoming issue of Cultural Anthropology. It was written as part of a tribute to the great American Studies scholar George Lipsitz. So often, cultural critics accuse digital media of undercutting our relations to the local, cutting us off from the world around us. So often, cyberspace advocates have constructed the digital through their own fantasies of dislocation, seeing it as a space where one is liberated from parochial constraints rather than authenticated through local cultures. Consider, for example, John Perry Barlow's famous formulation in "A Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace": "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather .... Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." Here, Barlow renounces all claims upon the local while insisting that the local renounce all claims on him. So it is refreshing to learn about a project where the web is being used to heighten our awareness of local cultures.

A case in point: Brian Wood's Local. Brian Wood is an alternative comics writer whose work has the feel of an independent movie -- complex and compelling characters, rich attention to detail, a slight political edge, and narratives that resemble well-crafted short stories. I was unimpressed by some of his early work but he took off a few years back with Demo, a series that used the superhero metaphor to talk about everyday people in everyday situations. Now, he has three very different series running -- Supermarket, which is a political action thriller; DMZ, which deals with an embedded journalist in Manhattan in the midst of a war on terror that has cut the city off from the rest of America; and Local.

As Brian Wood, Local's author, explains:

People use the place of their birth as an identifier, they wear it as a badge of honor. It's shorthand to explain huge chunks of their personality. Some people stay in their hometown for a lifetime, while others can't leave quickly enough, only to feel it pull them back.

Each issue of Local takes place in an American city or town (such as Richmond, Portland, Burlington, Halifax, Madison, or Minneapolis), cities that are rarely depicted in our popular culture but have a strong sense of location. Wood solicited photographs of these communities from people who lived there, collecting local landmarks that can help ground his stories, and includes guides to these cities written by local authors in the back of many issues.

To publicize the series, Wood has constructed a website where people can submit accounts of their own local communities, pitching them as locations for future storylines. Others can come and vicariously consume their sense of the local with either a specific nostalgia for a place they no longer live or with a generalized appreciation of the imagined authenticity of local experience.

I am intrigued by the idea that cyberspace may be a place where authentic locals can be produced, shared, traded, and consumed. These local memories are becoming more and more precious in a world where the average American moves once every five years and often across regions. This sense of the local speaks to me as a southern ex-pat living in the North who is watching many of my ties back to Atlanta, my home town, breakdown as my mother and father pass away and we sell off family property.

The Truth About The Pink Pig

So I was very interested to find on the Local site a poster describing a landmark that was very much part of my own experience of growing up in Atlanta:

The Pink Pig rollercoaster sits on top of Lenox Mall. It's one of those wacky, only-in-America local traditions by which I'm both embarrassed and mystified. The ride goes up sometime in November every year--it marks the holiday shopping season. It sits on top of Macy's, in a tent bursting with pink pig merchandise, nostalgic pictures of pink pigs from the past, pink carpet, a Christmas tree decorated with pigs....To me, it seems silly and indulgent and another one of those weird effects of rampant consumerism. But then again, it's only a dollar to ride. And everybody's got to have some local holiday tradition.

Of course, as a native Atlantan of long-ago, I remember when the store was called Rich's and was locally owned and operated (Indeed, one of my great aunts spent her entire life working for this Atlanta-based department store). Rich's was deeply enmeshed in the history of Atlanta going back to a dry good store created by Hungarian immigrant Morris Rich on Whitehall Street in 1867. The downtown department store, established in 1924, remained a center of the local culture, politics, and economy into the 1970s. The store was long noted for its liberal exchange and credit policy which allowed many poor Atlantans to buy into consumer culture for the first time. (There are so many classic stories about poor people bringing goods that were purchased decades before and trading them in for cash at Richs. This was in an era where the customer was always right and where the store cared what happened to the people in their local community.) Martin Luther King got arrested during a sit-in at Rich's Magnolia room in 1960.

Federated Department Stores acquired Richs in 1975 and merged it with R.H. Macy and Company in 1994. In a prime example of corporate insensitivity to local traditions, the chain renamed all of the remaining outlets Macy's in 2005. Given the rapid turnover in a city like Atlanta, few local residents may remember that there ever was a store called Richs or that it worked so hard to maintain its ties with its local customers.

So, I bristled at an account that describes the Pink Pig as a Macy's tradition. I also recall that the Pink Pig once ran along the top of the downtown flagship store of the Rich's chain -- at a time when the ride allowed you to see the city's skyline and circle the Great Tree. The lighting of the Great Tree on Thanksgiving night long represented the start of the Christmas season in Atlanta. When the flagship department store closed in the mid-1970s, it was widely read as the final sign of white flight from downtown. The Pink Pig was relocated to the suburbs where it ran along the third story rooftop of a suburban cluster mall.

And of course, because of the erasure of history here, the poster misses the final irony: the Pink Pig became the Christmas tradition of an immigrant merchant (widely whispered to be Jewish) operating within a Bible Belt society, a final wink at the very process of assimilation. Today, it is just another brand icon -- no more or less ironic than the white polar bears which Coca Cola has decided we should associate with the holiday season and its own locally produced brand of sugar and soda. It is probably the last thing that distinguishes the Atlanta Macy's from the chain stores elsewhere around the country. What one woman sees as emblematic of the preservation of local culture was experienced by me - an Atlantan of a different generation -- as equally emblematic of the ways local cultures are being displaced and destroyed.

The Limits of Local Knowledge

Ironically, of course, this desire to produce a multitude of local experiences means that neither the writer Brian Wood (who was born in Vermont) nor the artist Ryan Kelly (who lives in Minneapolis) have personal ties to most of the places they are depicting and in some cases, they have never been there at all. Moreover, the central protagonist, whose travels and experiences provide the glue which links the various local stories together, must be continually dislocated, can live no place because she has to go everyplace. One recent issue set in Nova Scotia seemingly parodied this sense of dislocation: she comes into town and starts work at the Oxford Cinema, a local retro house; she picks up stray name badges from the drawer in the ticket booth and tries to assume those various identities, making up back stories to go with the names, until her various lies catches up with her.

So, the stories are mapped onto the local but do not originate there; the protagonist, like the reader, passes through the local but never resides there. As Woods explains:

The Local stories will be universal, whether you live in Portland, the Pacific Northwest, America, or the rest of the world. But, for the locals, the stories will contain landmarks and references that'll be instantly recognizable.

The series, in short, encourages a fascination with the "local" as a kind of authenticity but it may not be able to produce the kind of local knowledge it is seeking -- not in a world so much subject to flux and change. The local may exist for us now simply as an object of nostalgia -- but not as a real place you can go back and visit from time to time. Susan Stewart taught us that nostalgia represents a desire to return to a world that never really existed.

My family roots go back at least six generations in Georgia, probably more: my grandfather moved from the country to the city after World War I; my father lived in Atlanta his entire life; I have lived in four different cities; my son has lived in eight. Of course, if we had stayed for another generation in Atlanta, we would not have slowed down the process of change: the joke is that Atlanta's skyline looks different every time you drive into work in the morning. Cultural historians and anthropologists understand the local as always in flux and transition, a place where traditions are constantly being invented and reinvented. Indeed, some research suggests that those who remain behind may embrace change, where-as those who left seem to adopt a much more conservative perspective - wanting to be able to return home whenever they want to a world that looks just like it did when they left. We hold onto the idea of deeply rooted local cultures as a way of speaking about what we feel lacking in our own everyday lives. In such a world, the local represents where we are from and not necessarily where we live. We festishize the local because we can never really possess it.

Sneak Preview: NBC's Heroes

If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them? Could you build a superhero story around a metaphor for female adolescence? Around midlife crisis? Around the changes adults go through when they become parents? Sure, why not? And if a superhero can exemplify America's self image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhero exemplify America's self image during the less-confident 1970s? How about the emerging national identity of a newly-independent African nation? Or a nontraditional culture, like the drug culture, or the 'greed is good' business culture of the go-go Eighties. Of course. If it can do one, it can do the others.

- Kurt Busiek, introduction to Astro City: Life in the Fast Lane

The San Diego Comicon has become one of the landmark events in the world of branded entertainment. Begun as a fan convention, Comicon has become much much more. While comics readers remain a small, tight-knit, niche market, the influence of comics extends outward to shape all other entertainment media. As longtime DC editor Denny O'Neil told the Comparative Media Studies colloquium several years ago, comics now constitute the "R&D" sector of the American media - comics don't make much money themselves but they test strategies, model content, and experiment with new relationships to their readers, which will later be deployed across film, television, and video games.

In such a context, the country's biggest comics convention has also become a test market for a range of new entertainment franchises. Take a look at the list of new films and television shows which will be previewed before the Comicon crowd this weekend. Producers, directors, network executives, and cast are waiting anxiously to see how the Comicon crowd will respond to their brainchildren.

One of the shows which will get its first public airing at San Diego this year is NBC's new superhero drama, Heroes. I was lucky enough to get my own advanced look at the series (don't ask how...) and wanted to offer my own thoughts on how it is apt to be received within comics fan culture. There will be a fair amount of spoiler information in this piece, but you are going to have to click to the continuation page to see it. If you just want some broad evaluative comments and background, you can keep reading this top level and then skip to the very end.

Unlike most previous stabs at superhero television, Heroes is not adopted from an existing comics franchise; it was created specifically for television, though its creative team includes several who have solid comics pedigrees - notably Jeph Loeb (best known at the moment for the Batman: Hush series). So far, searching the web, it would seem that the series has only started to register on the radar of most superhero fans, who are still nursing disappointment that two other highly publicized pilots - the adaptation of the Luna Brother's Ultra miniseries (imagine the Ben and JLo story told in a world where superheroes replace movie stars as the favorite topic for celebrity gossip) and Mercy Reef, (a Smallville-style version of the Aquaman mythos) - were not picked up for the fall schedule. What little online discussion I've found suggested that its premise, which bears a superficial relationship to X-Men, led to it being perceived as similar in spirit to Mutant X, a short-lived series which borrowed heavily from (i.e. "ripped off") the established Marvel franchise. If fans are imagining a rapid-paced, larger-than-life and somewhat campy superhero romp, they are in for a surprise.

This show owes more to indie and alternative comics than it does to the DC and Marvel universes: its tone comes closest to Brian Woods' remarkable Demo series of last year (more on this later) or perhaps the kinds of stories one is apt to find at publishers such as Vertigo, Dark Horse, Image, or Oni. I call such publishers mid-stream: that is, not quite mainstream and not quite alternative. They tend to build on conventions of established genres, but pull them in innovative new directions. Their stories tend to be quirky and personal, somewhat dark, intellectually challenging, socially subversive, and aimed at more mature comics readers. These are my favorite kinds of comic books, ones that seem to fall through the cracks between the two main comics news magazines, Wizard (whose editors never met a mainstream superhero they didn't like) and Comics Journal (whose editors never met a mainstream superhero comic they did like), but often attract enthusiastic interest for online fan publications, such as The Sequential Tart. Hopefully, if you are a comics fans, these reference points can help you calibrate your expectations.

If you are television fan, it might be helpful to describe this as "must see TV," that is, a quality drama with an ensemble cast and well orchestrated story arcs, focused more on its character's inner struggles than on external struggles (so far, the only character to wear anything remotely resembling a traditional superhero costume is wearing a cheerleader uniform.) I would place it roughly in the tradition of The X-Files, Lost, and Prison Break in both its emotional tone and its intellectual demands on the viewer.

The series opens with the following text, which more or less sets up its core premise:

In recent days, a seemingly random group of individuals has emerged with what can only be described as 'special' abilities. Although unaware of it now, those individuals will not only save the world, but change it forever. This transformation from ordinary to extraordinary will not occur overnight. Every story has a beginning. Volume one of their epic tale begins here.

Casual comics readers will certainly associate this idea of random everyday people acquiring special abilities and confronting its impact on their lives with the X-Men franchise, but similar premises run through a range of other texts, including George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards books or J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars series, both of which come closer to the spirit of this particular narrative.

Spoiler Warnings Start Here

Those who read my earlier post about Krrish will be interested to know that the series opens in Madras, India, where a young professor is lecturing a class on his groundbreaking work in genetic engineering and we soon learn that his father, another professor, has left India to come to New York in search of clues about what he thinks may be some world-altering shift in the human genome.

Professor Mohinder Suresh is one of two Asian protagonists in the series: the other being Hiro Makamua, a otaku-turned-salary-man who is the most pop culture oriented figure in the series. If Prof. Suresh speaks about the events through a mixture of scientific and spiritual analogies, Hiro makes sense of the changes he is experiencing via references to Star Trek, manga, and specific issues of X-men comics. As he explains "every ten year old wishes they had super powers and I got them." His more down to earth friend dares him to teleport into the women's restroom and dismissing his buddy's claims of superior abilities by asking whether they can help him get laid.

The aptly named Hiro is nothing short of exuberant about the discovery that he can manipulate time and space, running shouting through the maze of cubicles in his workplace and laughing giddily when he teleports from a bullet train into the heart of Times Square. For him, having super powers is one big lark, something that makes him exceptional, after being a perpetual loser who was the last in his class and the last picked for any sports team. We can see these two figures as reflecting the further globalization of American television - adding to the ranks of Iraqi, African, and Korean characters on Lost and paying tribute to Japan and India as two central comics producing and consuming countries.

Hiro's fanboy ramblings are simply one of a number of suggestions here that the creators know and love comic conventions even as they are choosing to warp and stretch them for this version of the story. Pay attention, for example, to the role music plays here - several times sending up conventional superhero scores even as it settles into a soundtrack that feels more like a Wes Anderson film than a big screen blockbuster.

Earlier I mentioned Brian Wood's Demo as a point of comparison. For those who don't know the series, Wood is a hot young alternative comics writer whose recent work has taken on new maturity - in part from his ability to play off the tensions between genre borrowings and a much more realistic/pessimistic representation of the world. Demo was a series of short stories about everyday people who suddenly acquire super powers; none of his characters save or transform the world; they are still struggling to get some control over their own lives. The super powers are often incidental to the events of the stories and in some cases, you have to look closely to see them at all. The stories capture a kind of longing and frustration that in Wood's works seems to be the common human experience, something like the quiet desperation that Thoreau wrote about. His characters include working stiffs trapped in nowhere jobs, runaway teens trying to escape domineering parents, angry young men who have never fully accepted traumatic childhood experiences, and a serviceman who has the ability to hit anything who he shoots at but is saddled with a growing conscience about the human consequences of war. In each case, the super power either becomes a metaphoric extension of their emotional conflicts or simply one more complication in an already troubled situation. And Wood avoids altogether the capes, masks, secret identities, transforming rings, and other gewgaws we associate with Golden and Silver Age comics.

Similarly, Heroes takes the superhero genre in some of the directions suggested by my opening quotation from Kurt Buseik - seeing the superhero as a powerful metaphor that can be used to explore a broader range of human issues. Take for example Claire, a cheerleader growing up in a small Texas town in what looks to be a stifling family situation who discovers that she is nigh on indestructible and spends the first episode testing the limits of her remarkable healing powers - flinging herself off buildings so she can push her dislocated bones back into place, sticking her hand down a garbage disposal in what seems as much an act of bored desperation as anything else, and in one of the few moments which looks like a traditional superhero story, rushing into a burning building (except the act of saving a trapped victim is incidental to her desire to see how well her body holds up under extreme heat). If Busiek suggested that the superhero might shed new light on the adolescent female experience, this is an interesting experiment - one where superpowers are linked more to "cutting" or eating disorders than to notions of power and social responsibility.

Or consider the case of the agonizing artist Isaac who seems, under chemical influences, to be able to paint stylized representations of events which have not yet taken place but who is pushed by the end of the first episode into self mutilation because he is so horrified by his clairvoyance. Or there's a young single mother, struggling to keep her child protégée son in an elite private school by stripping but in the process, over-extending her credit with a local loan shark: she is haunted by a "second self," an image in the mirror which may have the power to intervene on her behalf. And then there's Peter, the much-dismissed younger brother of an ambitious politician; Peter believes that he may have the power to fly but still can't get any attention for his sibling.

These characters embody forms of longing and desperation that one rarely sees on television - if for no other reason than that the problems they face are unlikely to be solved by a bite from a radioactive spider or a burst of Gamma rays, let alone by mouthwash or toothpaste. And there are moments here which remind me of films like Crash or Grand Canyon, where people from very different backgrounds cross through each others lives and sometimes have unintended consequences. As the series proceeds, I have no doubt that these lives, seeming so separate at the outset, will become more and more intertwined. In the short term, though, viewers can enjoy looking for subtle -- and not so subtle -- hints of connections between them.

Its somewhat bitter aftertaste links the series more closely with Brian Woods' Demo than to most mainstream superhero comics. The characters here seem drawn earthward - more like suicidal jumpers - rather than skyward. None of them yet knows how to leap over tall buildings with a single bound and we are left with the sense that they are going to have to struggle to bring their emerging powers under their control and to make sense of their impact on their self perceptions. As with Demo, these characters aren't going to run right out and buy fancy new superhero duds anytime soon and it is not yet clear that any of them is ready to take on great responsibilities when they are barely able to solve their own inner demons.

Around the edges, there are hints of dark secrets, perhaps a government conspiracy, perhaps bad guys who are going to track down those with powers and force them to make a choice about where they stands, but the first episode allows the protagonists to wallow in their various emotional responses to the discovery that they are not like mortal men. This is a series which will provide lots of fodder for internet speculation and decipherment within the fan communities that it is apt to inspire.

Spoiler Warnings End Here

All of this makes Heroes a worthy if risky experiment - so far, there's been much more room to experiment with the superhero genre through comics where the line between mainstream and alternative seems to be blurring more and more. (Witness, for example, the recent Project Superior and Bizarro books that have allowed a range of alternative comics folks to experiment both formally and thematically with the genre's core building blocks) Film has been perhaps the most conservative in its use of the superhero (where Ang Lee took some hits for making his version of the Hulk too brainy) while television has shown the greatest pull towards melodrama (Smallville) or romantic comedy (Lois and Clark). It is not clear how this alternative version of the superhero will play with younger comics fans who tend to make theirs Marvel these days or to those who know the superhero only through other media. I think more mature comics fans, especially those who toss something by Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, or Chris Ware into their pull bin, will really get into this darker than typical vision of the genre if they give it half a chance. And my sense is this may appeal to a large number of viewers who are looking for something different but who have not warmed to the colorful outfits one associates with most superhero television. This is certainly a series I plan to set my tivo for when the fall season rolls around.

One More Rec

While I've got your attention on revisionist superheroes, let me put in a plug here for John Ridley and Georges Jeanty's The American Way, a miniseries coming out this summer from Wildstorm,. This book seems to just get better and better with each issue. Set in the early 1960s against the backdrop of the New Frontier rhetoric and the beginnings of the Civil Rights era, the book depicts superheroes as embodying the social and political debates of the time. The core storyline deals with America's first "colored" superhero who the government has floated as a trial balloon, trying to build public sympathy for a hooded crusader (and only gradually revealing that he is black) but circumstances blow his cover and suddenly the issue of race becomes a central source of division and friction within the superhero community. Predictably, many of the southern superheroes are reluctant to fight alongside him and some resort to race-baiting, but the author is careful to show the complex and contradictory range of attitudes towards race that divided the south during this transitional moment. I've seen little buzz or fanfare about this book in the comics press but it is a provocative reworking of the superhero genre. The series is in its 5th of 8 issues so you either need to go to a store where you can buy back issues easily or hope that they put it out as a graphic novel when the current run is over.

Why the World Doesn't Need Superman

Before I start this, let me say that I have enormous affection for the DC superheroes, especially the Silver Age characters who were so much a part of my own childhood experience. There are still an ample number of DC books in my pull list at my local comics shop -- Million Year Picnic at Harvard Square. But of all of those classic characters, I have always had the least affection for Superman. (Frankly, for all of the bashing the poor guy gets, I have more good things to say about Aquaman as a protagonist than about Superman).

The reality is that Superman is and remains more of an archetype than a fictional character -- too powerful to be really interesting, too bland to be emotionally engaging, and too good to be dramatically compelling. Superman works best for me as a character when he is playing against someone else. Superman standing alone is like a straight man without a comedian, like vanilla ice cream without any topping.

Some writers manage to hit just the right note in the Lois Lane/Superman/Clark Kent relationship so that Lois represents a splash of vinegar tartness that plays well against Clark Kent's wide-eyed naivety (there's some great exchanges between the two in Warren Ellis's recent run on the Justice League that illustrate what I mean); Superman plays well against Wonder Woman especially if they tap the sexual tension between the two (see Greg Rucka's last issue on Wonder Woman, which works through the relationship between the two mighty heroes).

Superman plays well against Batman, setting up contrasting world views: the two keep each other honest, disagreeing about everything, yet ending up more or less in the same place at the end. In small doses, Superman pairs nicely with the Martian Manhunter or the Flash or the Green Lantern or Green Arrow. God help me, he even works in really small doses next to the anarchic comedy of Plastic Man.

I have enjoyed some recent books which explore him as an Icon (see what Alex Ross did with the character in Superman: Peace on Earth) or which turn the story upside down (see Red Son where Superman lands in Russia and ends up working for Stalin or Superman's Metropolis which melds together the myth of Superman's origins with Fritz Lang's German Expressionist classic). I can enjoy scenes where Superman's role as the ultimate establishment figure gets taken down a few notches -- see the treatment of the character in Darwyn Cooke's spectacular, DC: The New Frontier, where Wonder Woman and Superman debate the ethics and politics of the Vietnam War, or what Frank Miller did with an aging Superman (who looks more than a little like Ronald Reagan) in the original Dark Knight Returns series.

Perhaps the most interesting recent book to really systematically deal with the Superman character was Steven T. Seagle's It's a Bird, which really deals with the ambivalent felt by a long-time comics writer who gets assigned to do a script for the flagship superhero and doesn't know what to do with him. Superman is after all the top assignment -- even though he doesn't make the most money and isn't the most popular character with fans -- not by a long shot. The protagonist is struggling with a range of personal issues, mostly surrounding a family history of Huntington's disease, which distract him from but draw him back to engaging with the "problem" posed by the Superman character. He works through many key aspects of the character, providing both a historical context and a mythological analysis of the figure's place in contemporary culture. But in the end, he is no more able to articulate why we should care about this character than when it all started.

One can see why Superman exerts an inevitable influence across the history of superhero comics -- the place where all the parts came together for the first time and jelled in the public's imagination, the seed from which richer and more diverse characters could spring. Gerard Jones does a good job tracing the historical roots and impact of this figure in Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and The Birth of the Comic Book.

At the end of the day, though, he feels like a museum piece. I have been working hard to try to get excited about the new Superman movie. Honestly, I have. I have gone back and reread some classic Superman stories. I watched the first two Christopher Reeve films again on DVD. But I came out of the theatre and instead of feeling exhilarated, I shrugged. The film wasn't as bad as I feared or as good as I had hoped.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the filmmakers had to deal with two layers of iconicity: first, there is the character of Superman and then, there is the aura of Christopher Reeve, who has emerged over the past several decades as the closest thing imaginable to a secular saint in our culture. So, if you can't touch Superman and you can't touch Reeve's performance, then you are more or less painted into a corner -- all you can become is, to borrow a phrase from Pulp Fiction, "a wax museum with a pulse."

So, let me point you towards two links that I enjoy precisely because they don't treat Superman as sacred and instead, have fun at the character's expense.

The first is a now classic essay by science fiction writer Larry Niven -- "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" which explains once and for all, why Superman could not and should not make love with Lois Lane. This is not appropriate reading for small children, the politically correct, the faint of heart, or anyone else easily subject to irritation. As he explains:

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles.

Superman would literally crush LL's body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.

Lastly, he'd blow off the top of her head.

(Garth Ennis plays around with precisely these images in The Pro in a moment which has to be seen to be believed.)

Thankfully, the filmmakers anticipated this issue and has the Man of Steel shed his super-powers long enough to bed Lois in Superman II and thus pave the way for the events of the current film.

The other link is to a webpage that reproduces a number of those classic Silver Age comic book covers where Superman looks like he is about to do something really nasty to one or another of his good friends. Anyone who read those books knows that the covers were usually deceiving and there was a perfectly rational explanation (like time travel or mind control or a especially virulent form of kryptonite) to account his uncharacteristic behavior. But, as this site suggests, if someone did a fraction of the things that Superman did on those covers (even for good reasons), you just might not want to be his friend anymore.

Have fun!

Truth, Justice and the South Asian Way

This past weekend, like millions of fanboys (and fan girls) around the world, I went to see that hot new superhero movie -- not the one you are thinking about, the one with that guy from the planet Krypton. I went to see the other one -- Krrish. Krrish is what some are calling the first superhero movie to come out of India and it is playing across the United States -- not at the local multiplex or even the art house but in small ma-and-pa run theatres which cater to the local south Asian population. Most of these theaters don't advertise in your local paper so if you are wondering if it is playing in your city, check here. Krrish is a huge box office success in India -- having more than doubled its production costs in its first ten days in theatres -- and there is already speculation that it will be the first of a long running superhero franchise.

In its broad outlines, Krrish features much which will be recognizable to American comics and superhero fans: a larger than life, too honest to be true, ruggedly handsome protagonist who becomes a masked crusader while hiding behind a secret identity; a plucky female reporter with a tendency to get in over her head; an evil scientist bent on global domination; lots of high voltage action sequences; and a headline-chasing publisher/network executive who is more interested in unmasking the hero than celebrating his contributions to civic virtue. There's even a moment of painful choice when the protagonist has to choose which of two loved ones he will save from a certain death.

This being a Bollywood production, there was a lot more -- spectacular musical numbers (including one at a circus which quickly turns into an action sequence when the tents catch on fire), broad physical comedy, intense melodrama, romantic scenes, and so forth. What many western fans love about Bollywood movies is their tendency to bundle together as many different genres as possible and to play them against each other to create an extended (3 hours plus) evening of entertainment. Another pleasure is seeing familiar formulas get transformed as they are rethought for the Asian market.

An Indian Superboy?

Much like the western Superman who has been read as an embodiment of national myths and ideals, there is much which speaks to the specifically Indian origins of this particular story.

For one thing, the early signs that young Krishna may have superpowers come when he turns out to be a protégé at sketching and then confounds the teachers at his local school with a spectacular performance on his I.Q. exam. The American counterpart would have led off with his strength, his speed, or maybe even his X-ray vision but having a superior intellect has rarely been a prerequisite for becoming a superpower in the western sense of the term. Throughout the film, in fact, the other characters consistently cite his "talents" but rarely his "powers" as if he were destined to become an extremely gifted knowledge worker (and indeed, it turns out that the ethics of knowledge work for hire are at the center of this epic saga.)

His special powers are modest by western standards, though spectacular enough by local standards. Much like the original Superman, he covers vast distances through long leaps but doesn't actually have the ability to fly. He can scale a mountain peak as if it were a series of stepping stones. He can run faster than the local horses. He can reach into the river and yank out a fish with his bare hands. And he can speak with the animals and get them to do his bidding. And, in several sequences, he demonstrates his superiority, Gandhi style, by withstanding enormous physical and emotional abuse without resorting to violence.

As with the western Superman, his adventures begin when he lives the small town (village) where he was raised and move to the city but in keeping with the modern era of South Asian Diaspora, he goes not to Metropolis but to Singapore in pursuit of the woman of his dreams, who turns out to be not only a modern working girl but a Non-Resident Indian.

Krishna must adopt a secret identity in order to do good deeds when he comes to the city because he must remain true to a promise he made to his grandmother -- there's a lot in this film about the obligations the young owe to their elders. In a move almost as unconvincing as that bit when nobody recognizes Clark Kent as Superman because he took off his glasses, Krishna masks his identity by adopting the superhero name, Krrish. (Of course, there's something of a joke being made about Singapore's reputation for multiculturalism when the public is quickly convinced that the South Asian superhero might actually be ethnically Chinese and go under the name Christian.)

The villain turns out to be Dr. Arya, the heads of a global information technology empire, who has made his reputation for his contributions to wireless mobile telecommunications, but seeks to develop a supercomputer which will allow him to see his future. He has built the original machine by exploiting Krishna's father -- another supergenius, who like his son, gains his powers from contact with a visitor from another planet. The wonderful machine functions like the magic devices of so many classic folktales: it shows just enough of the future to convince people to tempt their fate but they are always blindsided in the end.

A Global Production

The film was conceived and directed by Rakesh Roshan, who had previously created Koi...Mil Goya which he claims to be the first science fiction film produced in India. We get some glimpses of that earlier film here through flashback sequences and there is much which will remind you of E.T. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Green Lantern. As one Indian blogger notes, Krrish merchandise is holding its own across Asia with competing goods for the new Superman movie -- though she notes, both sets of products are actually made in China.

Westerners are going to be tempted to read the film as a symptom of cultural imperialism -- taking a strongly western genre and trying to sell it back to the American market. But that's too simple -- especially given all of the ways I've identified above that the superhero genre gets reworked to speak to specifically Asian values and concerns and the ways it gets mixed with other genre elements which are more closely associated with the Bollywood tradition.

Rather, we should think of this as a global cultural product, all the more so when you consider that the action sequences were directed by Tony Ching, the Chinese-born fight choreographer who worked on such PRC films as Hero and House of Flying Daggers; the special effects sequence were developed in collaboration with Marc Kolbe and Craig Mumma (whose work was featured in Godzilla, Independence Day, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) as well as a range of India-based effects houses, and the second half of the film is set amid the futuristic landscape of Singapore, including a sequence featuring the world famous Orang from the Singapore Zoo (who is identified in the film as Mao, perhaps appearing under a stage name).

As CMS alum Parmesh Shahani, a longtime observer of the Bollywood industry, explained to me:

This film has been made with loads of co-operation from the Singapore govt. Obviously some countries (Singapore, Switzerland, etc) have realized the vast reach of Bollywood - and want to tap into this. They are first movers and are thus gaining the tremendous equity that comes with this. Tourism is the most obvious thing that comes to mind that Bollywood films can promote - but bear in mind that Krrish also positions Singapore as a corporate center, a media center, and a center of cutting edge research and development - all the things that the Singapore authorities want to promote Singapore as internationally. So they're using Bollywood very savvily - as one more node to spread their very consistent brand message.

Hoping to capitalize on South Asian interest in the film, the Singapore tourism agency has organized a Krrish tour.

If you want to read more about this film, check out this New York Times story

Back Story: Indian Comics

The release of a South Asian superhero film comes as western comics fans are increasingly being drawn towards Indian comics. While comics are a worldwide phenomenon, superhero comics were until recently almost exclusively an American genre. Superman and Spider-Man's overseas appeal were totally dwarfed by the Phantom, an adventure comics figure largely forgotten in his home market but enormously successful across the southern hemisphere. The Indian comics market is dominated by Amar Chitra Katha, a comics publisher that primarily taps the country's rich historical and mythological traditions.

I have been told that there is also a lower-class local tradition of superhero comics -- many of them appropriated and reworked from western iconography -- but it is hard to get information on such comics here in the United States. (If there are any readers out there who know about such works, I'd love to hear from you.)

More recently, the American comics publisher, Marvel, collaborated with the India-based Gotham Studios to create Spider-Man: India, which depicted the adventure of the Mumbai-born Pavitra Prabhakar in his struggles against the Green Goblin who is the reincarnation of the ancient Indian demon, Rakshasa.

Even more recently, there was the announcement by Virgin of the creation of a new animation studio and comics publisher which will be introducing South Asian content into the global market. Japanese manga now far outsells U.S. produced comics even in the American market and other Asian publishers hope to follow their example. We can expect to see more Indian influences on comics in general and superheroes in particular in years to come.

And we can point to a growing number of western comics which have self-consciously displayed a South Asian influence, including Peter Milligan's Rogan Gosh, Grant Morrison's Vimanarama, Warren Ellis's Two-Step and Antony Mazzotta's Bombaby, the Screen Goddess.

Krrish is probably not the film that is going to open the western market for Asian-produced superhero movies (though there's lots to entertain western fan boys like myself.) But then, the Indian film industry outperforms Hollywood across Asia and many other parts of the world so they aren't exactly standing by and waiting for our approval. It's their party and they can fly if they want to.

Special thanks to CMS alums Parmesh Shahani and Aswin Punathamberkar for their help in preparing this post.