Some More Notes on Comic Book Logic (2)

So, onto Goldman’s Rule number (4) and its relevance for my understanding of Comic Book Logic: “the comic-book movie doesn’t have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way”.

As I’ve mentioned before, the first thing one derives from such a iteration is an implicit condemnation of escapist forms of entertainment. However, that is not helpful when dealing with comic books, as they are – as every other popular form of entertainment – escapist in nature, inasmuch as life problems tend to be totally ignored or wholly subject to larger-than-life crisis. On the other hand, unless one professes that fiction must be absolutely faithful to life as we live it, there would be no point in comics, films, music or books as they would be at best confirmation of one’s insignificant role in the grand scheme of life, at worst a dreadful bore.

To say that comic books – and therefore comic book logic – do not conform to life as it exists, could also mean (and necessarily does) – as I’ve pointed out in my previous post – that superheroes, by definition, do not conform to the natural laws. They are not bound by gravity, affected by friction, explicable through biology or physics; they are, in all other aspects but their diagetic origin, god-like.

Now, it is true that not all comic books are superhero comics; and it is also true that superheroes were not the first ones to come back from the dead – if not the first, the most famous example of resurrection by popular demand is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, returned from a fatal fall over Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem” (1893), further reinforcing the tie between comics and pulp traditions (and, apparently, confirming Goldman’s assertions, as even the supreme value of life – and the ultimate sacrifice of death – seem to be devalued). But this allows me to stress the fact that my own understanding of comic book logic is best illustrated by superhero comic books. It’s not a matter of it being applicable mainly, if not exclusively to superheroes, but that they do serve as a reductio ad absurdum that help to gauge said logic in other comics. For, in a final instance, Comic Book Logic is no more than a special case of willing suspension of disbelief.

This being said, what am I aiming at? What is the subtle distinction that differentiates it from the logic of, say, pulp fiction? On first attempting to answer this question I felt it was a matter of degree. One could be made to believe that, say, Indiana Jones could escape from a pilotless plane about to crash by jumping from it using a blanket to slow down his rate of descent, parachute-like (THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES #4, 1983).

Everything in the scene conforms to the laws of physics: Indy uses the blanket to slow his fall (or to “glide” as the caption puts it), and then, when the unforgiving sea waters grow near with the implacability of a brick wall and the blanket no longer holds, he spreads arms and legs to increase air-resistance and, in the final moment, positions his body in the most hydrodynamic configuration to diminish the force of the impact on the water.

Again, as I said, everything in the above scene conforms to the laws of physics, even if not to the law of averages. I bet not one in ten thousand doing what Indy did would be able to survive (or even have the guts to try it). It is an exaggeration, what we can call an extraordinary man facing extraordinary circumstances and playing the laws of probabilities. He is, after all, the story’s hero. His actions are believable, even if the outcome strains our willingness to accept it as totally feasible. After all, we expect extraordinary solutions from heroes. But at no moment did we expect Indy to start flying, or for a flying man, wearing a cape, to rescue him in the nick of time.

So, pulp logic – the daring of possible feats in impossible circumstances – would be a degree below the logic of super-hero comic books – the violation of the laws of physics, instead of the laws of probabilities. Pulp logic will strain, but not break, the laws of physics.

But I soon understood that was not enough. And not only because much of pulp fiction depends on violations of the laws of physics (time-travel, hyper-spatial velocity, FTL drives, magic, etc…), but because if we accept super-powers as something akin to super-scientific gadgets (or magic for that matter) we would be left with nothing to differentiate pulp logic from comic book logic. So, despite being close, there’s another factor that we must bear in mind.

I wrote before, in this regard, that “comic books are ruled by their own self-validating logic, a logic that cannot be challenged by facts extrinsic to their own internal consistency.” And, it was pointed out by Gene Phillips, prompting this train of thought, that so is pulp fiction. If one accepts FTL as a given, the story logic must be judged not by current physics, but by another set of assumptions that admit FTL travel. The consequences of such possibility must be logically appraised in relation to the fictional admittance of that tenet.

In order to avoid an endless circular reasoning, instead of defining the difference as a matter of (probability) degree, one must search the answer in another, obvious, but subtler difference. And that difference resides in the fact that pulp logic applies to the entire fictional universe, whereas comic book logic applies only to super-heroes. That is to say, if there is something like FTL drives, teleportation or magic in a given fictional universe, every character in that universe is, in principle, capable of using it. If Indy can jump from a pilotless plane, so can Hildy, Jack or Minnie. The rules of reality, strained as they may be, apply equally to all. The fictional universe differs from ours in some ways that are typical of that universe, not of the characters populating it. In the case of the Indiana Jones example, the universal laws are the same as ours. But in super-hero comics there are two sets of laws operating: the laws that apply to super-powered beings and those in touch with them, and those that apply to the common characters of that universe (be them our laws, or the ones that allow for FTL, magic, etc…). Again we have a matter of degree of separation from the known laws of physics, but in the rules governing comic book logic, we have two different standards to measure them.

I know this sounds like a wee bit feeble argument. Obviously, super-heroes, because they have super-powers, defy – by definition – the laws of physics. It is a logical tenet of the story that even if Superman can fly, no one else can. He is, after all, an alien from another world that gains powers from the radiation of our yellow sun. Every other kryptonian, in fact, will have the same powers. True. And it is also true that every common character can gain super-powers in the same way as any other: being bitten by a spider, fused to metal waldoes, genetic mutation, electricity igniting chemical compounds, etc…  And from that moment on, they will as well be freed from nature’s constraints. Also true. But that is not what I mean. Let me demonstrate. Consider these panels from MAN OF STEEL #1 (1986) and SUPERMAN #18 (2013):

John Byrne’s take on Superman defined the Mythos for the generations that followed. The panel above represents the moment – that became canon – when Superman appears in public for the first time, stopping an experimental space-shuttle from crashing in Metropolis. The shuttle – a concept now dated, but then much en vogue (for good and, then soon to be, sad reasons) – has been substituted by commercial airliners in more recent takes in SUPERMAN – THE ANIMATED SERIES (1996) and the dreadful MAN OF STEEL (2013) by Zack Snyder, but one can easily find other instances where Superman (or Supergirl, Power Girl, Captain Marvel, The Hulk, whomever) stops fast moving vehicles with his bare hands.

Such instances serve a clear purpose: to illustrate the hero’s power. He can stop a diving airplane, stand the impact of a runaway train, stop the out of control truck from hitting the old lady in the street. And, usually, they are opportunities for artists to exhibit their talent for representing that power through the representation of energy and motion. And it really works. The reader is lead to believe that – having accepted the essential impossibility of the hero’s powers – he could do it. If the hero has super-strength, super-speed, the ability to fly, why, surely he can do it!

However, one needs not think long to know that it isn’t so: never mind that Superman himself would need to have an engineering degree just to know where to apply pressure, where to lift, where not to press; airplane’s were not designed to be held by the tail, to stand impacts on the nose, their wings are really not that resistant to applied pressure from solid objects, nor to torque motions at high Gs. If Superman were to stand in front of a falling commercial airplane, ready to stop its fall, his hands would go straight through the nose of the airplane and the avionics lodged there. Would he grab it by the tail, his fingers would tear the flimsy fuselage at best, break the airplane in half at the worst. That is, assuming he could stop the airplane at all, lacking a firm support where to ground the force necessary to stop de airplane’s momentum.

The most illuminating example is, perhaps, the recurring moment where Superman (or any other superhero) must stop a speeding train or truck. Were we to discard Newton’s laws of motion, pretending that he would be able to stand his ground by planting his feet at an angle, thrusting them as deep inside the earth as he could, he would not stop the train (or truck) but disintegrate it. But bringing such laws back in the equation, what is more expectable, is that the kinetic energy of the speeding vehicle, and its mass, would overcome Superman’s resistance as the entire strength he can apply comes from the friction of his feet with the pavement. For instance, Manuel Moreno Lupiáñez and Jordi José Pont, from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, calculate in their 1999 textbook “De King Kong a Einstein: La física en la ciencia ficción” (From King Kong to Einstein: Physics in Science Fiction) that given a weight of about 90Kg for Superman, would he try to stop a truck of 50 tons, moving at 100Km/h, and admitting Superman would survive the impact, he would be only able to exert a force of about  880N that would cause the truck to decelerate 0.02m/s each second.  That is to say, Superman would be able to stop the truck after 25 minutes and at a point 20Km from the point of impact. Something very distant (pun intended) from even the most approximate depiction of such a feat on ACTION COMICS #1 (2011) by the superior Grant Morrison (writer) and Rags Morales (art):

A depiction that would be slightly more credible if Morales didn’t draw Superman with his feet barely ever touching the ground – which means that after the initial impact the train isn’t even loosing speed from Superman’s action.

But a lot more interesting than this simple demonstration is the situation represented in the previously reproduced panel from SUPERMAN #18. In it, due to a hypnotic command imbedded in a DJ’s sound system, a small crowd of party-people start to jump lemming-like from the top a skyscraper. From the story art we get just an incomplete picture, but one that allows us to measure the height of the building at no less than 65 meters (21 visible stories, considering each to be 3 m from floor to ceiling, plus 2 meters for the ) and the jumpers to be no less than 28:

And Superman saves them all just shuttling up and down at full speed, picking them from the air and depositing them on the terraced rooftop of a near building, adding that much distance to his dislocation. Well, at sea-level a falling body does so with a constant acceleration of 9.8m/s², that is, from a starting zero-velocity, each and every jumper will accelerate towards the earth, changing his velocity by an amount equal to 9.8m/s. That is, the jumper will have travelled 9.8 meters at the end of the first second, 29.4 meters at the end of the second second, and 58.8 at the end of the third second. That is to say, each of the jumpers would hit the ground in less than four seconds, with a velocity of 35.7m/s or 128.5 Km/h (you can check my calculations here). And, from the image above, we can estimate that the human lemmings are jumping in bunches of six, one after another, with intervals of less than a second. But let us give a comfortable margin of about five seconds for each suicide to stop drinking or dancing, moving to the edge of the building and jumping. Each of these 28 jumpers, in bunches of seven, would take less than 40 seconds to hit the ground (five seconds interval between the 4 bunches = 20s, plus the falling time of 4 seconds for each bunch = 16s). Inside this time interval, Superman would have to change from Clark into his red-and-blues, and execute more than 28 high-speed flights for, as Superman himself lets us know, “Soon as I catch them… they leap off again”. That time-frame must include deceleration to soften the impact of the falling revelers against his arms, acceleration towards the ground or the nearest roof, again deceleration to drop the almost-suicide, then again acceleration towards the next intended victim that would have kept falling, doing so with even higher velocity and with less space for deceleration, and so on.

Should we accept that Superman could travel at the necessary speed to get to the twenty-eight jumpers – never less than 1.579,5Km/h, faster than sound – and that he could catch them and take them to solid ground, we would be forced to conclude that each of the victims would die or suffer severe injuries from pulped or blasted inner organs from the sudden deceleration and acceleration of their savior, along with burns from contact with Superman’s body, heated by his friction with the atmosphere at such velocities, not to mention pure and simple physical disintegration under the unbearable G-forces.

With this, I intend to show a very simple fact: that used to reading comics under the  premise that superpowers are indeed fantasy, demanding we willingly suspend our disbelief (much as FTL travel in Star Trek or Hyperspace drive in Star Wars demands of us), we don’t usually stop to ponder the consequences of the use of those same superpowers. That is to say, even if we admit that Superman can fly at super-speed and can withstand the impact of a speeding train, we must also recognize that even if it was possible, Superman wouldn’t be able to use such powers to stop a train, or to save people falling from a skyscraper, or to safely land a crashing airplane. To accept this second degree of impossibility, we must accept Comic Book Logic: the necessary mental or thought process that derives from impossible powers impossible consequences, in such a way that although not conforming to reality, is coherent with the way we imagine those impossible powers to work. We need a double-degree of suspension of disbelief, that second degree defining Comic Book Logic; a reading logic that goes beyond Pulp Logic.

One can argue that Comic Book Logic is a symptom of the atavistic infantilism of the comic book medium itself. And in some ways it is undeniably so (although that is an issue to expand in a later post). However it may be, the inherent tension in Comic Book Logic (and the thought processes it demands) sometimes allows for great comic book moments, precisely because the artists break the logical convention with their readers: 

In such unexpected moments, the comic’s creators allow reality to supersede Comic Book Logic, to intrude in the comic book world with sudden and unexpected fury (or maybe coldness is the most appropriate term). The shock of intrusion is clearly psychological, and it is clearly strong, for it necessitates a sudden jump between levels of reading, the brutal passage from a reading code to another, with all their respective expectations: from Comic Book Logic to Real World Logic. From “life as we would prefer it to be” to “life as it exists, as we know it to be”. An in that brutal moment, we feel comics as we never did before. In that SNAP moment when Gwen’s slim neck brakes under the sudden stop that breaks her fall. As soon as the Green Goblin threw her from the top of the bridge we know she is dead – that’s the world as it really is. There’s no way in the known universe to stop her fall. And yet, we are reading the story under the influence of Comic Book Logic and we know Spider-man is there, and he has enhanced-reflexes, enhanced-strength, and he shoots webs from his wrists, as strong as steel cables and as flexible as a real spider’s web. And we have seen him do it time after time: stopping criminals in mid-air (the Vulture, the Goblin himself), surviving vertiginous falls by the simple expedient of shooting a web or creating a web-safety-net. We know he will save Gwen. What we fear is that he might miss Gwen, and that she will plummet to her death. But, as we know, that’s not what happens. He does catch her. What really happens is that reality intrudes for the first time, in a way it never had before, and what kills Gwen is Spiderman’s own powers. It betrays reader’s expectations, it forces him to change reading planes, planes of overlapping logic, and the effect is devastating. That SNAP sound is the most shocking and violent onomatopoeia in the history of comics. It echoes over the Hudson, reverberating inside the empty soul of countless readers of all ages. Cold, real, definite: SNAP.

Comics being comics, Gwen came back as a clone only two years later in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #144 by popular and editorial pressure. But her death changed comic book history forever, and it still helps us understand the reading process of comic books. As I said above, Comic Book Logic may be understood as a symptom of infantilism in comics, not as much of the comics medium itself (although it is childish enough – and even more so under the recent onslaught of PoMo feminism and multiculturalism), but of the expectations readers sometimes derives from them. This will be more evident when I’ll discuss the use (or absence) of rape in super-hero comics as another instance where (some) readers seem unable to cope with reality’s intrusion over Comic Book Logic.

But that is a matter for another post. Before I finish this exposition of my “No Theory” of comics (in part three of this long rambling) we’ll make some detours in order for me to address two aspects (I don’t know if they have enough dignity to me thought of as corollaries) derived from this post’s conclusion: this I’ll do in the next (short) posts before I turn to part three (you all know where I’ll be getting at: super-hero costumes). Sorry for the extended absence from this blog. Let’s see if I can keep myself on track from now on.