Comic Book Logic works because it maintains the
coherence between the reader’s expectations and the storyworld. We accept superhuman powers as a given, and so we
accept their functioning inside its own intrinsic logic. It is as if each and
every super-powered being acted inside a sphere of non-causality, with varying
radius, and inside that sphere, their powers work as they should were it not
for the uncompromising laws of physics. To reach such affect, writer and artist
must aim at the realistic portraying of impossible feats, both in story
structure as in art. By realistic I
don’t mean mere photo-imitation (one can be realistic without adhering to
realistic representation), but a special codification of the logic structure of
the working of such feats against the story’s expectations. The risk here is
that Comic Book Logic should
inadvertently slip into Cartoon Logic.
The image above, from FANTASTIC FOUR #4 (1962), sits uncomfortably near to that fateful
incline towards ridiculousness. Mr. Fantastic, here penciled by “the king”
Kirby, looks disproportionate in relation to the buildings that surround him.
At that height, just try to imagine the size of his feet, dozens of meters
below. In the early stories from Marvel’s Golden Age (during the Silver Age of
Comics) the super-heroes’s super-powers were somewhat fluctuating and
malleable, as if they hadn’t been completely thought out (as they probably
weren’t) before being committed to the printed page. Here, Mr. Fantastic not
only expands his body, as he seems to expand his size and mass as well – something that seems awkward, for a man of
the size of Reed Richards on the panel above would be so massive that he
wouldn’t be able to stand, and much less move. But although it is a silly
situation – Mr. Fantastic stops a helicopter to ask if those aboard have seen
the Human Torch – it still hasn’t slid entirely into a cartoonish mindframe.
As it had done, for instance, in the previous
issue (FANTASTIC FOUR #3), when the
same Mr. Fantastic turns his body into a racecar-wheel:
Please mind that Mr. Fantastic didn’t turn
himself into a tire (which would be ridiculous enough by itself), but into a
full functioning wheel for a speeding racecar, in the middle of a high-speed
chase. Think of the sheer mechanical complexity of such feat, and the mind
boggles…
Truth is, Cartoon
Logic, just as Comic Book Logic,
does not adhere to the laws of physics, but unlike the latter, it does not
aspire to present a credible representation of the storyworld. Cartoon Logic
thrives on the unexpected, on the surrealist logic of dreams, on the unchecked
imagination of children still free from a sense of the world as it is. Its is a
logic of free-association, of willingly incoherent rules, where one cause does
not necessarily produce the same effect twice. Its dimension is a dimension of
symbols, and when it invades the real world, it does so with a hint of madness.
Maybe madness is a strong world, for this
madness I’m thinking of is no more than the craziness of childhood. For only a
child could imagine an entire building floating through the skies, ridden like
a ski by a semi-naked Amazon that, lassoed to an invisible airplane through a
golden lariat, drives that incredible mass of tons of bricks and steel, with
the might of her shapely thighs. Well, maybe not just children, for the above
scenario appears on the pages of THE
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #28 (1960), written by Gardner Fox and penciled by
Michael Sekowsky:
Super-hero comic books were on their twenties
when these two examples were published. Still a long way away from the
revolution that would shake the comic book world around 1970, ushering the
greatest comic book era of all time – the Bronze Age of Comics –, and that
being so there were sometimes childish stories, already bearing the seed of
great things to come, but not always more sophisticated than their forebears
from the Golden Age were (1938-1954). Comics in their infancy, are surely
entitled to the occasional slip into cartoonish situations.
Not so with more recent comics, where Cartoon Logic sometimes erupt like a
mushroom on a well-kept lawn. In modern super-hero comic books, such eruptions
tend to signal a return into childishness, an attempt to remove comic books
from the adult status they sometimes have achieved, and throw them back into a
mythical infancy of safe parental embraces. Of Saturday morning cartoons.
Consider, for instance, the following panel from HARLEY’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK #1 (2016), written by Jimmy Palmiotti
& Amanda Conner, and penciled by the same Amanda Conner with John Timms:
This is the kind of image we expect from French
or Italian comedy films of the sixties and seventies (movies by Jean Girault or
Michele Lupo for instance), films where the chaos of the surrealist imagination
would subvert to comic effect the strictures of neo-realism and the less than
ideal real world politics.
I’ve stressed in my previous
post that Comic Book Logic could
be a symptom of the infantilism in the medium of comic books. When it slips
into cartoonish antics, it is undeniably so. Consider that Wonder Woman would
be subject to the same Newtonian laws that governed Superman’s attempt to stop
the Metropolis Bullet in ACTION COMICS
#1 (2011) (as also discussed in my previous
post). The same as saying that in the
real world she wouldn’t have made it. The momentum of the speeding Mini
would push her for kilometers, even if she could keep her arms locked with
enough strength to prevent the sword from cutting her in half. Accepting – as we do – Comic Book Logic, we would also accept that she would be able to
stop the car with the blade of her sword, smashing in the entire front of the
Mini. But to slice the car in two perfect halves, cutting through the motor
innards like it was butter… I’m sorry, but that is pure Cartoon Logic – something beyond even the brilliant cartoonish
buffoonery of Deadpool, a character with a logic all of his own.
As I reread the previous lines, I can’t help but
feeling that I’ve wasted too much time on what shouldn’t be more than a short
footnote to my previous
post. And I’ll be the first to admit that none of the examples quoted are
enough to disqualify comic books as relevant pop entertainment. But I feel that
these hints of childishness that sometimes creep back into comics, hark to
something darker, as childishness is not always equated with innocence.
Childishness is also a symptom of totalitarian thought control, and there is
one aspect of this control that I want to discuss briefly in my next post: rape.
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