INTERREGNUM (iii): Comic Book Logic, Torn Costumes and Violence

Doc Savage is the most well known precursor to modern-day super-heroes, and several authors have already noticed the striking similarities between this Man of Bronze and Siegel & Schuster’s Man of Steel. In fact, Doc Savage stands in the unmarked frontier between pulp fiction and comic books, serving as the prototype to both Superman-like heroes and Batman-type action-detectives, as well as several other tropes. In his crime-fighting and adventurous career, Savage fought criminals, mad scientists and natural monsters, including dinosaurs, and had to survive firefights, crashing planes, sinking subs, fires, explosions, and everything else ‘Kenneth Robeson’ (mostly Lester Dent) could think of. As a result of such extreme adventures and near-misses, the tattered shirt of Doc Savage became a permanent fixture of the character in such diverse media as pulp covers, comic books, graphic novels and films, functioning as a signifier of extreme violence. By means of contrast, injuries were kept to a minimum, mostly never more than a broken lip or a bleeding nose. It was as if the damage suffered by his costume/clothes stood for the intensity of the violence he had to suffer through. Very much as it goes in cartoons (printed or animated) where a character (say Bugs Bunny or Donald Duck) after surviving an explosion, is shown with body blackened and clothes in tatters for a few seconds, before regaining his normal un-disheveled appearance. And such graphic practice was transmitted to comics from its very beginnings.

As I will explore in my next post (the last of the two-year-in-the-making introductory posts to this blog), the superhero costume is very much part and parcel of the hero’s identity and personal definition; something that shouldn’t need further explanation as through the years we’ve seen different characters assume the mantle of iconic super-heroes like Batman, Batgirl, Robin, Captain America, Black Panther and such, implying that besides the particular powers specific to each character, it truly is the costume that makes the hero. Even when, as is the case with Doc Savage, the costume is merely defined by tattered clothes, something equally valid when dealing with Savage’s own female version: his niece Pat Savage.

I’ll admit that what I’m about to posit needs a little more statistical confirmation, but I’ll advance it anyhow in the spirit of impressionistic empiricism: as Mulvey, Dworkin and McKinnon’s unsubstantiated assertions on female objectification and identification of sex with violence drove feminist and extreme-right reaction against female (and even male) exposed flesh, comic book creators started putting forth lame explanations for costumes not to get torn to shreds.

I guess one can set CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS as the representational turning point, with a bevy of costumes being torn as entire earths and heroes were swiped clean, culminating in the torn and bleeding Supergirl dying with her costume in tatters, a confluence of torn costume and injuries, and a vision not soon to be repeated. In his re-imaginings, Byrne would erase the smallest rip from Superman or Wonder Woman’s costumes, with ridiculous explanations of bodily auras that would protect the cloth in contact with the hero’s skin, and generating endless jokes about the incredible number of capes Superman had to replace.

However, as the successive torn capes made clear, even Byrne felt that the costume in tatters was the best way of representing the outcome of physical violence, short of representing the real outcome of violence itself. That is: broken teeth, black-and-blue pulped flesh, broken bones and lots of blood. And, in a way, that’s the way comics went under the neo-victorian code of representation. Intact costumes would demand and bring forth ever more excessive degrees of physical violence. Thus, we went from something like this: 

 

to things like these:

Of course, for the progressive politically-correct noisy minority, violence is always preferable to sex, blood to breasts, death or mutilation to pin-up poses, better to allow them to hypocritically rage over their filled-to-capacity refrigerators. And so, the blood for intact costumes mode of representation became dominant in the major publishers, and affected both male and female characters. Case in point, one of my first pre-adolescent objects of desire: Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers).

In the seventies, after she emerged from the shadow of Capitain Marvel, Carol Danvers became one of the most popular female superheroes, Marvel’s worthy response to DC’s more tame Supergirl (also a Danvers, and my first ever comic book crush), even if not to ür-Superheroine, Wonder Woman. Hailed as a feminist and progressive icon (something over which not all feminists are in agreement – what else is new?), she nonetheless figured in two cult-covers from her own magazine, where torn costumes are used as effective pointers to the level of menace facing Ms. Marvel (even if not at all faithful to the stories within).

Both covers substitute the torn costume for any bloody signs of violence, which could be confused with topic domestic violence, or battery and assault (and Odin knowns the sexual readings that radical progs, fed with Freudian-mush, already get out of the covers as they are). But, as I stated above, torn costumes had to go, to be replaced by more overtly violent graphics. Now the question is how to represent that level of violence when the one on the receiving end is a super-powered, practically indestructible, super-being, without letting it slide into cartoon caricature? And the answer is: not easily.

Let us consider MS. MARVEL #18-24 (2007-2008), a set of books that comprises the “Puppets” and “Monster and Marvel” story-arcs, both of them easy fodder to varied readings and interpretations.  However interesting as they are (and I intend to do a go-over around “Puppets” in the future), it is not the stories per se that I want to tackle now, but the graphic representation of violence, as it escalates towards a maximum of absurdness of which the creators seem not to be aware.

It begins in MS. MARVEL #18, when our heroine is hit point-blank with a grenade that literally explodes on her face without causing the smallest rip on her costume.

If one was to take that as a little bit absurd but still within the bounds of comic book logic, issue 20 brings a quick escalation of power-yield, as Carol once more comes out unscathed from what appears to be a multiple-megaton blast.

Needless to say, despite emerging from the blast amidst a maelstrom of raging fire, her costume remains equally unscathed.

Immediately in the same issue, Ms. Marvel’s quarters aboard a S.H.I.E.L.D. light helicarrier are destroyed in another impressive explosion when hit by an alien missile.

And again, there seems not to be any amount of energy capable of damaging Carol’s costume:

But if you thought that impressive, by issue #21, Carol drops from the outer atmosphere of some alien world… in her pajamas… which miraculously come equally unscathed from the fall and the friction and the heat generated by both.

And there’s no way in hell that repeated references to the “blue stuff inside me” can explain the indestructibility of Carol’s clothes. And it doesn’t stop here, as the creators (writer Brian Reed and penciler Aaron Lopestri) go one over the top and in MISS MARVEL #24 don’t shy away from a good-old nuclear blast at close range in the plain vacuum of space:

It is a spectacular blast that sends the equally indestructible alien creature careening through space, gaining Ms. Marvel – and Earth – some well needed time.

Of course, once again, both Ms. Marvel and her unbelievably resilient costume survive unscathed, even adding another vertiginous fall through the atmosphere.

Both story arcs from which the images above were selected are told with verve, both literary and visual, and one comes out of them with a distinct impression that its authors are aware they are straining the good will of their readers in accepting that a mere piece of cloth could survive such rough handling; not only that, one senses they know their readers will swallow it whole, because not to do it would be politically incorrect. (Surely they wouldn’t believe their story was so brilliant one wouldn’t notice how synthetic fabrics can withstand nuclear explosions and temperatures as close to those of the sun as they can get.) Underlining these impressions, is the fact that in MS. MARVEL #21 the issue of Carol Danvers/Ms.Marvel’s identity is broached in a pertinent way, denying any exceptionality to Carol/Ms.Marvel’s costume:  “We’re the same person. I am Ms. Marvel. It’s just a costume”.

Now, one can argue that something in Ms. Marvel’s powers can keep her clothes intact; not only her uniform, but also her pajamas. That somehow, Carol’s invulnerability extends to whatever she’s wearing. But how could this happen?

True, in issue #23, Carol discovers that the alien Cru can “turn her powers off”. Certainly that could explain how the alien’s sting could penetrate through Carol’s costume and Carol’s flesh. Bu then how to explain this in MS. MARVEL #19?

Despite catfighting Tigra (no pun intended) for over two pages (ok, one’s a splash page) and then tackling Silverclaw for two more, Ms. Marvel comes away bleeding from her torn cheek, but with her costume absolutely pristine: again, with costume intact in order not to raise the ire of the righteous left, it is necessary to draw (pun intended) blood. (It is true that in the story, the scratches on Carol’s face are a contrivance used to subdue Ms.Marvel through a toxin in Tigra’s claws, but that does not explain how could the striped ex-Avenger break Ms.Marvel’s atomic-blast-proof skin.) 

 

I think I illustrated – although briefly , and without delving  too much on the details of both story arcs, resting on a more visual approach – how I think that the politically correct refraining from present the female characters in ways that could eroticize them through too much exposed flesh , or even equate too uncomfortably eroticism and violence (not that they are mutually exclusive, quite the contrary, but remember this is literature for children – some, quite sophisticated children, but children nonetheless) led to the need to represent more blood and bodily maiming to convey the same degree of danger and menace that yesteryear was conveyed by torn clothes.

So it is that we see Carol Danvers scratched and bleeding, with her back torn by the barbed tendril of Cru, blood running like gravy from her rendered flesh, but with costume proper and primly intact, surviving explosions and nuclear blasts. Carol’s costume in this pages seems like the huge elephant in the middle of the room, that everyone is pretending no to notice. And more than following comic book logic, it calls our attention for nothing as much as those old Disney comics: for kids, you know!

INTERREGNUM (ii): Comic Book Logic and Rape

Comics suffer the constraint of perception. For all of its growing social relevance, for all of its long history from the pages of the funnies to the glossiest of graphic novels, comic books still bear the stigma of entertainment for kids. Comics are still that crazy kid’s stuff. And hence that delightful paradox: no longer for kids, who barely think of sex, they’re targeted at teens who barely think of anything else. And one thing teens won’t find in super-heroes books is sex (at least beyond the tame suggestion of it in the context of romance).

Now, it is obvious that sex mustn’t have a prominent place in super-hero comic books, since as a rule those are not erotic or porn books. Each genre with its own rules, even though nothing prevents genre fluidity, or the successful inclusion of explicit content in superhero comics, as both Comico’s ELEMENTAL’S SEX SPECIAL (1991-1993) and WildStorm’s THE BOYS (2006-2007) or Dynamite’s HEROGASM (2009) clearly attest. Nor is either of those matters the point of this brief post, although I intend to tackle both of them in future writings.

If I now bring up the subject of sex I do so in a more specific context – that of rape in superheroes comic books, and even so (saving the subject for a future and longer post), only as the utmost perfect illustration of Goldman’s rule #4: “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”. Even if the way we prefer it to be is childish.

First of all, I’m not talking about graphic representations of rape. Just as graphic representations of sex, they would have no place in mass-market entertainment like the comic books put out every month by Marvel or DC. What I really want to discuss is the very concept of rape. The basic idea that anywhere in the universe – in the superhero universe – such a thing could happen. To anyone. Let alone to some super-powered female come from Krypton or a power-stripped mutant in Genosha (yes, I’m thinking of the infamous UNCANNY X-MEN #236) or Kansas, or whatever.

Despite endless talk about why superheroes need secret identities to protect their families and the ones they love, we know that the Vulture, or Doc Ok, or Venom will go straight after Peter once he advertises his true identity, and if they go for Aunt May or Mary Jane, they’ll do so without the least lubricious thought in their minds.

However, one would expect rape to be a professional hazard to super-heroines (if not super-heroes). After all, their job is to fight, many times at close quarters, with vicious super-powered villains intent on world domination and drunk on power. And even more so if said villains are of the Freudian persuasion.

In fact, reality tell us that, even allowing a large margin for underreporting, and despite a decline in crime statistics, and if we’re to believe the UNODC data for 2011, more than 26 women for each 100.000 is a victim of rape, while the FBI, for 2012 alone, lists a total of 67.354 female victims of rape in the United States. In the military (something more akin to superherodom) that number rises to one in three.

But, just as it happened with Gwen Stacy, the intrusion of reality in the comic book world is a shattering event. That supervillains are willing to rape, and that superheroes are unable to prevent it, is something people seem incapable of handling. It’s something that defies Comic Book Logic, something that further punctures the improbability sphere that surrounds the world of each main character in superhero books.

Indeed, the rape of a minor character, Sue Dibny, in a hugely popular mini-series – IDENTITY CRISIS (2005) – was probably the most decried event in comic book history. In fact it was decreed anathema from all quarters. It was deemed by some to be “the stupidest, most offensive move in modern comics”, while others considered it “the embodiment of all of the worst aspects of current super-hero comics”. Some tried to justify their aversion to it because the story did not dwell at length with the trauma of the rape victim, as if that was or should be the point of the story. And others still, with shock-and-awe bombast and no sense of ridicule, proclaimed that “the rape of a superhero's spouse ripped through the superhero community, broke rules of corporate superhero fiction, and left the spirit of the DC Comics universe in tatters.” But, in the end, what they all were objecting was this:

Quite restrained isn’t it? Even tame, by comparison with some of the other images I chose to illustrate this post. There’s nothing graphic about it – not even the slightest hint of nudity, despite the discrete rrrrrp sound that I imagine is Dr. Light ripping Sue’s trousers. So, the only thing objectionable on this scene is the shock of the rape itself. The unexpectedness of it. Not the unexpectedness of “how could it have happened?”, but of the more crude “How dare them (the publishers/writers/artists) do it?” type. As an example, Shaun Spalding, referring to IDENTITY CRISIS, admonishes his readers: “If you’re going to write a rape into your superhero comic book, be prepared to write it well.” Sadly, no examples are given on how to do it. What a surprise.

The best way to summarize the reaction and the ballyhoo about this scene is the one employed by a reader in a comments thread (and I’m sorry for dropping on her shoulders the heavy burden of poster-girl for social indignation) when she wrote that:

“My primary problem with Identity Crisis, which I mostly liked, was the rape because it wasn't necessary to the story. Dr. Light being crazy dangerous and smart enough to infiltrate the satellite and hack their computers and threaten all their loved ones was enough.”

The shocking thing in this scene was, in fact, that Dr. Light dared go beyond the mere threat. The thrill of the menace was enough, just like in a theme park ride. In the comic book world some readers like to inhabit, bad things don’t happen to good people. Superhero’s wives are not raped by unscrupulous villains. Super-heroines are not objects of desire. It’s safer that way.

In truth, this kind of reaction harkens back to a time when comic books really seemed incapable of going beyond infantile prudishness even when dealing with larger issues. Take, for example, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #84 (September 1962). At a certain point of the cover story for that issue “The Mighty Thor vs The Executioner”, Dr. Don Blake (Thor) is captured by the titular villain, a prescient ersatz Guevara/Castro figure that shows us the Marvel was much more aware of socialist reality than many of its critics.

 

When the Executioner, who has noticed the enticing young American nurse Jane Foster: “Such lovely eyes… such soft hair” is clearly a displaced appreciation of the girl’s other bodily charms – unmentionable by name in a comic book for kids. The sexual subtext is there, the libidinous menace is clear; and, noticing the concern of Jane over Dr. Blake, the ersatz Cuban dictator expresses his most primal instincts for the young American girl:

  

“Would you marry me?” Yes… the sexual subtext is there, in a language that only children could identify with.

INTERREGNUM (i): Comic Book Logic vs Cartoon Logic

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.