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.

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.

Some More Notes on Comic Book Logic (1)

In a comment on my last post, Gene Phillips made a pertinent observation about my use of ‘comic book logic’, noting (rightly) that “it's a tradition that long precedes comics. The original TARZAN novel is full of "comics logic," both in the way the ape-man teaches himself how to read, and in the way he manages to become a muscular super-stud rather than looking the way REAL feral human beings look.” And, indeed, most iterations of comic book logic (CBL) are an ingrained part of the tradition of popular and pulp fiction, and most certainly do historically precede both comic books and pulp fiction; I think it wouldn’t  be too far-fetched to find examples of it not only in medieval chivalric “romances”, but also in Classical Greek literature and mythology. This being so, I feel it necessary to elaborate a tad bit more on my use of Comic  Book Logic.

Mainly, because I think it differs in a crucial point from the common use as illustrated by the Tarzan example adduced by Gene – in itself as comic book logical as one can expect. Lets consider, for instance, the loose definition William Goldman uses to describe what he deems ‘comic book movies’ in his fascinating memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood (1983):

(1)    Generally, only bad guys die. And if a good guy does kick, he does it heroically.

(2)    There tends to be a lack of resonance (…); it’s not meant to last.

(3)    The movie turns in on itself: its reference points tend to be other movies. (…)

(4)    And probably most important: 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. (Quoted from the 1997 reprint from Abacus, London).

On first reading these points, one feels, undoubtedly right, that Goldman equates the comic-book movie with what we would call a ‘pop-corn movie’, the kind of film one parks the brain in the foyer and enjoys in a state of mindless stupor. Nothing wrong with either of them, nor does Goldman cast aspersions on their enjoyment.  If I have some contention with any of these four points, it’s with the implied criticism of so-called “escapist” entertainment, and (again, merely implied) support for stale realism in point (4). Of these four points, number (3) defines what may or may not be a characteristic of comic book logic, post-modernism, and, along with point (2), somewhat debatable, have no great import for what I intend to address.

However, points (1) and (4), taken by themselves, or in tandem, offer some valuable help for me to formulate my meaning of CBL. Lets begin – as we should – with point (1). In my thirty years of reading comic books (from the time I’ve ditched Disney and started first reading the Belgian and French bandes desssinées published in TINTIN magazine, and then DC and Marvel) I’ve lived through a good dozen deaths of super-heroes. And, in the main, super-hero comic books conform with point (1) of Goldman’s list of rules. Bad guys have a higher mortality rate than good guys, and good guys do die great epic deaths.

The first super-hero death I remember reading was Jean Grey’s at the climax of the ‘Dark Phoenix Saga’ in UNCANNY X-MEN #137 (1980). At first sight, Jean’s death conforms to each and every pointer to ‘comic-book’ death per Goldman: it is one of the most heroic deaths one can remember and, deservedly so, it remains at the top of any list of Great Comic Book Moments. Jean’s death is unquestionably heroic, but is it a ‘comic-book’ death?

Not to my thinking. Obviously, the sacrificial hero is a central tenet of the Christian mythology, and surely predates it for several centuries. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross (in itself a cheat, as in true comic book fashion, it has been retconned throughout the centuries intro being a self-sacrifice with pre-assured resurrection) lacks the over-the-top heroic quality of Phoenix’s death, opting instead for a weighty dramatic core that apparently removes it from the canon of ‘comic-book’ deaths.

However, Claremont’s take on self-sacrifice was a winning and rewarding bet. Instead of going for the ages-old hero-sacrifice to save the Universe from whatever threat endangering it (or from Evil, as in the Christian cannon), Jean is dying to save the Universe from herself. That she chooses a moment of battle adds an epic dimension to her death, but what makes it really memorable – as corny as it may sound – is that her sacrifice is framed as the apex of a love story. A love story that Byrne’s artwork elevates to cosmic proportion through the identification of its flame with the explosions from the fight on the Moon and the all-consuming light of the Sun. If ever a succession of three panels so perfectly condensed the theme of one story it surely was the one above these lines. And, I’m sure you’ll agree, dear reader, these three silent panels are soaring with epic music, an unheard soundtrack that echoes the music of the spheres. 

Then came the bloody, cruel, gratuitous, totally unexpected and devastating death of Elektra Natchios in DAREDEVIL #181 in April 1982. I do remember seeing the cover of that special issue (then in Portuguese, but with the same layout if I remember correctly) promising “Bullseye vs Elektra. One wins. One dies.” and thinking, shit, there goes my favorite Marvel supervillain!  Alas, that was not to be. Now,  maybe I felt Elektra’s death more than most for I and a good friend had also created a Greek female character for a project we were writing (both of us in high school), and Elektra worked as a personality model for her. We were so in love with her. She was gorgeous, and implacable, and a skilled fighter, and yet so… unexpectedly humane. And so, to see her stumbling and bleeding as she dragged herself to a cold painful death in Matt Murdock’s arms… it somehow didn’t seem right. Didn’t seem fair. And it was a bravado piece of art.

I read somewhere that the Comics Code wouldn’t allow for the graphic representation of a blade coming out of a pierced body, that being the main reason Miller had the blade pushing Elektra’s tunic away from her back. But wow! What an effect. The panel looks like a moment of imponderability, a nanosecond frozen in time; just that infinitesimal fraction of an instant before gravity reasserts itself and the blade will come through the cloth, and the body’s weight will slide the blade impossibly deeper inside Elektra.

The ninja’s death is one of the more touching I remember reading. It was in no way an epic death. It was a lonely death, the outcome of a cowardly trap, a solitary fight among the garbage and the cold. As if, touched by the warmth of love, having spared the life of Foggy Nelson a couple of pages before, she had displeased whatever cold-hearted gods were watching over her. To die at the moment of redemption is the stuff of powerful myth. And it was the wisest of decisions by Miller, not to allow her to ever interact again with Matt Murdoch (although it would have been even better if he had kept his intention of not allowing her to be used again by Marvel).

And then, also in 1982, came the strongest of them all: Jim Starlin’s The Death of Capitan Marvel, the first in the new line of MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVELS. Fighting a cancer, Captain Marvel died peacefully under the respectful watch of his colleagues. It is not usual for one to find a moment of such quiet dignity between the pages of comic books, and it clearly demonstrates the more mature and adult bend Marvel wished to imprint to its graphic novels line, pushing it closer in themes and execution to the European bandes dessinées. Never, in my opinion, did the comics medium, so adroit at getting through the idea of LOUD sounds, so wonderfully convey silence as in that last panel, with one lonely word calling the readers attention to what must have been the slowly decreasing intensity of Mar-Vell’s heartbeat.

The epic dimension of Capitan Marvel’s death is elegantly displaced into a touching inner fight for acceptance of death itself. And when such acceptance is reached, Marvel’s alien heart – in a graphic representation – stops beating in a humanizing sign of the concept of the super-hero itself, no longer just a super-man, but human, all too human…  

These three examples somehow transcend the comics medium; or, at least, the popular perception of the comics medium as light entertainment for kids and teens. They certainly contradict Goldman’s first rule, for here we have three heroes dying in ways that are not epic in the common sense, although they are undoubtedly moments of undeniable grandeur. They are not comic book deaths, despite belonging to comic books.

And one other factor made them feel like real deaths: when each of this characters died, at the peak of their popularity (the cases of Jean Grey and Elektra), or because they were commercially expendable (Captain Marvel), their deaths were definitive. One didn’t come out of the reading with the feeling that these characters would soon return, retconed or revived, to grace yet more adventurous pages.

And then there came the infamous DEATH OF SUPERMAN. Despite even recent protestations by writer Dan Jurgens, the greatest comics event of 1993 felt like nothing more than a cheap gimmick. Now, please, let me qualify this statement: I don’t mean the story, or the art, were poor in quality terms or as a comics story; hell, even as a comics epic. But, simply, there was no way in heaven or hell that DC was going to kill not only their flagship character, but the most recognizable of comic book icons of all time. No way. The exact moment Superman’s heart stopped beating, there started the clicking of the clock counting down to resurrection. Every reader knew Superman would be back. The only question was just when (just about six months, as it turned out) and how (the silliest way possible).

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN forever cheapened every super-hero death that came after it. And boy, once the mortality of superheroes (the diagetic mortality – not the weird permanence of an eternal present, indifferent to the flow of time outside the narrative) was removed, they began to fall like flies: Batman, Captain America, Hal Jordan, Donna Troy, Wolverine, almost every main super-hero has died at least once over the years. And each and every time, we knew they would be back. In a more convoluted way, or in a less convoluted way, after a month or after a year, or after a decade, or in a parallel universe, we knew that – just like James Bond – they would return.

Besides degrading the face-value of the heroics currency, THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN brought about the absolute fulfillment of Goldman’s first rule: now, indeed, every superhero could die big epic heroic deaths (and more than once, even!), thus making super-heroes deaths truly comic-book deaths. (On an aside, one can classify Christ’s death as a comic-book death as well, as we all know he would return as well – I always found Christ’s sacrifice something like a kind of a cheat, except when watching the great death scene in William Wyler’s 1959’s BEN HUR.)

On the other hand, THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN underlined an essential characteristic of super-heroes, highly relevant to the point I want to make about ‘comic book logic’. Superheroes are not subjected to the laws of nature. This would seem like a simple lapalissade, but I think one tends to think of the world of comic books (a lot like the pulp fiction worlds) as not being wholly subjected to the laws of nature: men fly, machines fly faster than light, telepaths read minds, feminists sound clever, a professor and a student become fused as a single entity and radiation as the most astonishing effects. But I intend to separate these two propositions as follows: a) in super-hero comic-books, super-heroes are not subject to the laws of nature; b) everyone else in the same fictional universe is.

In a way, going back once more into the world of cinema, I think it’s totally appropriate to comic-books the reading Danny Peary does of the typical nameless anti-hero of Sergio Leone’s westerns in his Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful (1981). Equating Leone’s anti-heroes with the heroes of mythical Greece, Peary sees in Leone the working out of the premise of a mythical western era in which “several warriors were blessed with divine powers to help them in their never-ending combat (…). These warriors were (…) supermen who lived among mortals”.

And, I think, that’s the only way to understand the working of super-hero comic-books and of comic-book logic; a way that indeed has common roots with pulp literature, but goes somewhat beyond that. And that somewhat will be the point of my next post, when I’ll turn to Goldman’s rule number (4).