Seven Deadly Sins of Comics, Part VI: Smoke and Mirrors

Comics sometimes seek substitutes for or additives to storytelling in order to interest an indifferent readership in flagging titles or a dwindling medium.

Preachiness and Advocacy Politics

Rather than incite the readers to self-criticism, the politics of comics more often offers them an opportunity to self-congratulation for their ability to hear the writers preach to the choir.

While arguably prone to preaching, Denny O'Neil's GA/GL stories had impact because they invited a sometimes unwelcome self-awareness in complacent readers selectively blind to the issues they treated. Subsequent political comics failed to provide any such impact. Eager not to offend, today's political comics strongly assert ideas comfortably held by millions of Americans, but steer clear of true sacred cows.

It takes little courage to write a story that sets up a straw man and beats him down. It takes less when no one intends the reader to identify this straw man with himself. It requires nothing of the heroes to bask in the glow of a neon righteousness born of virtues that require no sacrifice of themselves. Nor does it require any self-analysis to denounce a caricaturish outsider for values that represent a parody more than a portrait.

We can therefore expect to see political stories attacking the "extreme right" as envisioned by the "enlightened left" because this reflects the inherited worldview that predominates in the comics industry. We can expect to see superheroes beating up white supremacists, "fag-bashers," and religious bigots (the bogeyman of a faithless world).

We will not see stories like this:

• Gay Awareness: The Joker shocks the world by "coming out."
• Gun Control: Superman decides, once and for all, to create peace on the streets of Metropolis by confiscating and destroying all the personally-owned firearms. Shortly after this, a female whom he disarmed gets raped and killed.
• Eco-Terrorism: Anarky, while blowing up bridges to protect the ozone layer, kills a busload of handicapped children, forcing more conventional heroes to bring him to justice.
• Race Politics: Some government body pressures the Justice League into accepting an inadequate member in order to satisfy a racial quota. One of the long-time members, protesting both the interference of intrusive government and the expulsion of another tenured member to make a space for the new recruit, walks off the team.
• Race Politics II: Superheroes prevent a super-powered racist skinhead character from waging what seems like a harassment campaign against a Black superhero. After the inevitable lectures about what filth the skinhead is, circumstances reveal that the Black superhero was actually a villain and that the skinhead targeted him for both the bad reason (race) and the good (the real danger he presented).
• Race Politics III: Superheroes track down and apprehend a policeman accused of beating/raping a member of some discriminated-against group. After dealing with this target and receiving considerable praise from the media and activists, they discover that the activists had faked the entire incident as a "consciousness-raising" publicity stunt.
• Taxation: A change in tax law forces Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark to go out of business or move to Asia. This ends the career of a superhero, whose physical position and/or economic condition no longer allows the indulgence of superheroism.

Note that, in all these cases, wrong remains the property of the outsider -- he who believes differently than you do -- and goodness inheres to the insider, who recognizes and obeys the standard of the group to which he belongs. In short, these stories only posit goodness as conformity to an imposed or agreed-to orthodoxy, much in the fashion of herd-instinct obedience that posturing reformers damn earlier generations for.

Political comics might be less dreadful if they actually set more than one viewpoint vying against its rivals, without distortion, in a manner that showed the downside of the positions of contention, but comics writers seem (with the exeption of the remarkably individualistic Steve Ditko) so wedded to a bland and complacent leftism that they generally remain altogether unable to frame a real debate. Thus, readers get, instead, a straw-man turkey shoot where the good / wise / sane / leftist hero straightens out the bad / naive / neurotic / conservative foil. In such circumstances, one need seldom actually view the event, since writers rigged the fight; only in such circumstances as the occasional unexpected twist does this approach allow the reader an opportunity to question, rather than congratulate himself.

Presented in a manner that pretends to confront controversy while actually hiding from it, though, the use of politics in comics frequently descends to a shallow attention-getting stunt rather than a matter of substance. Only rare exceptions take these topical stories out of the domain of smoke and mirrors.

Age of Gimmicks

In an age where one expects to see multiple collectible covers, embossed foil jackets, chic (if soon obsolescent) redefinitions of concepts in accord with this year's style, and dozens of other silly attention-getting stunts, readers sometimes found themselves wondering where the story had gone.

Unfortunately, comics frequently find themselves in a double bind. Sometimes readers do ignore brilliance, forcing publishers to bolster sales with things that do not relate to the quality of the content at all. When such maneuvers prove more important than substance in affecting sales figures, substance becomes a disposable quantity.

For the record, however, let me say that the visual sample here depicted - the copper-foil embossed cover of Avengers #360 - did not conceal an abandonment of quality; it reflected a comemoration of a thirtieth anniversary of the title's first edition. Nonetheless, this book could have done what so many others did: concentrate on the lure that would get a potential buyer to examine the product, rather than the "meat" of what it contained.

Gimmicks, however dubious in nature, still reflect considerable cleverness in design. We may find the foil cover; the embossed foil cover; the single issue with multiple covers (such as Green Lantern #101); the cover that combines with another comic book's cover to form a larger picture (such as Green Lantern/Sentinel: Heart of Darkness); the tease cover that contains characters that do not appear in the book (humorously used on an issue of Byrne's She-Hulk, which showed Spider-Man, the Wolverine, and Punisher on the cover as She-Hulk explained how clever wording indicated that these characters were on, not in, the magazine); and a fair array of others.

Gimmicks need become a cause of concern only when writers, artists, editors, or publishers use them to sell material that could not compete in the marketplace otherwise. Some observers accuse the "new comics" of this strategy, but said sub-medium has no more dirt on its hands than the mainstream that spawned it. Old comics have done the same thing, but can claim reader loyalty sells books during substandard runs; new comics laden with gimmicks can't point to this loyalty, and thus sometimes, at their nadir, appear as gimmicky covers on a package of stylistic and storytelling gimmicks.

"Attitude"

Boisterous, violent, and sadistic egotism - sometimes described as "attitude" - serves a wish-fulfillment function. One can imagine the obvious target audience of subservient males who dream of becoming alphas to whom others might cringe in fear, but I doubt that the appeal stops with those who serve as fresh meat for bullies. Probably anyone who must contain their hostility to others remains somewhat vulnerible to the appeal of this kind of "attitude."

In milder forms, including smart-alecky back-talkers (Deadpool), incorrigible clowns (Spider-Man, the father of wisecracking heroes), and the like, "attitude" can add some much-needed humor to a medium that sometimes takes itself too seriously.

Some writers seem to forget that the expression "He's got attitude" translates an older expression from an earlier English lexicon that tells the same information but reflects a changed set of values: "He's a jerk."

The latter description seems more apt for the likes of Wolverine-wannabes like Malibu's Ferret (in the picture) or Image's Deadlock (see him get what he deserves here). In such creations, "attitude" descends to the demeanor one would expect of a petulant sadist unfortunately invested with super-powers.

"Events"

Depending upon how creators handle them, events can provide considerable entertainment or a simple refreshing change from the normal course of a comic book. For instance, the short-lived "gray Hulk" period enjoyed a number of droll moments that refreshed the concept for readers wearied by years of purple pants and "Hulk smash!"

Not all events enjoyed such qualities. Some of them involved crass and anti-consumer sales strategies, such as the mega-crossover event that requires a reader to purchase all installments to make sense of the story. Rumor invests Jim Shooter with the invention of this marketing gimmick, so we know where to scowl as we consider things like Zero Hour: Crisis in Time and Operation Galactic Storm.

Events create a problem for comics. Since Stan Lee pioneered his vision of a shared universe for comics in which what happens in Spider-Man can affect what happens in X-Men and Fantastic Four, continuity has become more of a burden than a blessing (for more about this, see Part II of this series).

In "hard" continuity, comics stories must remain consistent with previously printed stories in what the publisher accepts as a canon of continuity. An "event" exists to sell more comics, generally by tracing a story through as many issues of as many different titles, especially those suffering poor sales; for a story logically to involve so many diverse characters, it must involve matters of some importance, and generally this devolves to tales of all the heroes in the universe trying to save the universe from a villain or villains who plan to destroy the universe. Put these things together, and you have a comics continuity that includes all of the heroes in a publisher's stable banding together annually to save the universe (or multiverse) from some new terror.

This does much to deflate reader interest (some readers do not feel the investment worthwhile if buying one comic book requires buying another fifteen to understand the first one). Some readers look upon event labelling as a warning rather than an invitation and steer towards comics that tend to "share" less in the shared universe, such as Daredevil, which often passes years without much interaction with outside titles.

Not all events involve massive cross-overs, though; some remain mostly contained in a single title. For instance, in the Incredible Hulk, the character passed through several years in which the character enjoyed considerable changes. One involved the reversion to his original gray form, with an accompanying and refreshing ouster of the ludicrous Hulksprach that sometimes lowered his title to the level of inanity found in the better Superbaby stories. This series of changes included, at times, the separation of the Hulk into two bodies, one for the Hulk and the other for Bruce Banner; Hulk becoming gray; Hulk turning green again but retaining Banner's mind (when angry, his body shrunk to Banner's frame); Hulk entering therapy to resolve the various forms into one whole that combined Banner's mind, the green Hulk's body, and the gray Hulk's temperament.

In the short term, using character changes as "events" can entertain, but can undermine the character concept if too many stories rely on such changes. For instance, I could not say which version of the Hulk appears in the title; if I had a preference, this might make me fearful to return to the comic lest it contain the "wrong" Hulk.

The need to allow character growth and change must somehow balance with a stable concept if a title is to enjoy long-term sales to persistent readers. If the new version attracts five thousand readers at the cost of fifteen thousand others, the event has, most likely, failed its commercial function, regardless of how well it might have fulfilled an aesthetic one.

Even in the short run, however, events do harm to comics by increasing the commitment necessary to buy comics. An event, even when contained by a single title, involves some background that may involve readers in the decision to seek out back issues to understand it and continue to buy to resolve it.

Which Readers?

At least for the much-needed new reader, comics should attempt to present a satisfying story within a single issue that a reader can understand. The Julius Schwartz principle, paraphrased, suggests that a comic succeeds in its design if this design begins with the premise that the target reader has never read a comic book before; if it appeals to that reader, it has succeeded. This model in no way precludes gimmickry, but indicts it as optional, ornamental, and unnecessary.

Should comics concentrate on dividing up the pie of a shrinking readership through attention-grabbing stunts, or by bringing in new readers who lack a background that reading comics for twenty years provides? The survival of the medium may depend on how the publishers answer this question.