Bizarro - Humor or Horror?

The more I read of this piece, the less light-hearted I found it. After a few stories, I began to remember that I used to have nightmares with characteristics of the Bizarro world - the men-made-monsters, the single, flawed mind divided among a world of separate bodies, the world where none of the shapes worked right and the culture at large celebrated some kind of decay.

Bizarro stories used to scare me, if only from the disturbing visual feel that Bizarro-artist-of-record John Forte used to give them. While the captions might blare about the hilarity the writers expected to ensue in the stories, what appeared on the printed page did much to throw fright into at least one kid back in the sixties.

The joke might have meant more to the adults involved - particularly Superman creator and Bizarro writer Jerry Siegel for reasons that don't necessarily reach children. Confront a four-year-old with the likes of Bizarro, however, and you might expect to see the beginnnings of a cycle of nightmares where identical armies of hideous, white-faced thinguses march through blighted landscapes where no protractor ever set the surfaces of a building to right angles.

The Face of Doom

The features of the Bizarro perhaps served originally to mark this creature - back when a single version appeared in Superman-related comics - as distinct from Superman. The mangled, crystalline tissues where Superman had something that resembled normal meat and skin served to show the alienness of the Bizarro; and perhaps the black circles around the eyes intended to bring out the low- and beetle-browed aspect of this creature and these creatures.

However, this face hardly presents an aspect inherently likely to elicit laughter. Those black bags under the eyes make me think of a few things, none funny. For instance, in the last months of Frank Zappa's life, as the cancer sucked away his strength and dragged him towards death, his own characteristically dark and sunken eyes became more pronounced.

Aside from real-world cases where one can attach this trait to impending death by horrible wasting diseases, we can look to cinema for examples where this dark and sunken-eyed look conveyed some aspect of the relentless march of entropy.

For instance, in one scene in Papillon, the hero hallucinates in solitary confinement about returning to France to a hero's welcome. Two dead prisoners come to greet him, and he realizes upon meeting them that they indeed have died - the blue faces and blackened eyes speak this point. And, at that moment, the camera reveals identical stigmata on Papillon's face.

"Goofy?" "Whacky?" Try disturbing.

The Lunatic Lockstep

Something in the notion of a planet populated entirely by iterated copies of a single individual, clad in identical garments, with so little difference between them that they can't truly tell one another apart, disturbs without more details added. But make these duplicates ugly and deformed; make them tremendously powerful but without the sense necessary to use this power to a sane purpose; and garb them in a parody of the clothes of a figure presumably dedicated to standing between Everyman and the dangerous forces of disorder; then you have something more akin to a Kafka nightmare than to a cartoon about the foibles of an intellectually limited protagonist.

That the Bizarro essentially replicates a single individual over and over in multiple forms - with slight variants, such as the Bizarro-Lois, and only rarely an individual - seems much more a theme of horror storytelling than humor.

For instance, consider a work of horror such as King's The Tommyknockers, where emanations from a dead and buried spacecraft began to transform human victims into semi-human beings, physically somewhat human but only approximately so, and not at all human in their thought processes insofar as human psychology begins with the individual as a unit rather than a single, like-minded hive where one mind occupies many bodies. The Bizarro race, with their identically disturbed thought processes, does not deviate far from this horror model.

Again, through three versions, movies called Invasion of the Body Snatchers dealt with forces that stole human individuality away and left behind essentially human bodies with nothing remaining of the human soul. Once more we find in horror a concept not far detached from the Bizarro premise.

We can find other examples of the dehumanized image conveyed by armies of identical drones in other pieces. In the films of Rene Laloux, marching throngs of identical faceless automata appeared in both Light Years and Time Masters, in each case in the role of antlike swarms eager to absorb and assimilate any contaminant of individuality that dared to intrude into their supposedly-perfect monoculture of a single mind.

The Lovecraftian Architecture

H. P. Lovecraft sometimes wrote of alien cities where the geometry did not quite work right - where angles did not resolve properly, where the sum of the interior angles of a square might not precisely add up to three hundred and sixty degrees. This distorted layout, this recurrent failure of architecture to follow orthogonal convention, served in his fiction to portray origins so distant that one had to seek a source somewhere outside the three linear dimensions plus time. Non-Euclidean and hyperdimensional geometry stood as symbols of foreignness and distance.

Bizarro cities, in a minimalist fashion, display a certain degree of the wrongness inherent in flawed geometry in somewhat the same fashion that Lovecraft intended to get across. While Forte and others might have seen in the gravity-defying forms of a Bizarro building a humorous reflection of their inability to reason properly, in context these cities mainly support the overall sense of wrongness that attaches to the entire Htrea/Bizarro world setting.

A Grownup's Perspective

From the point of view of someone closer to forty than to four years old, I can see the joke behind Bizarro. In a sense, the joke resembles the inherent gag behind early John Waters films. Imagine, if you will, a world of perfect ugliness, of grotesque actors mouthing bad lines while wearing ugly costumes and standing before cheap, shoddy, and aesthetically displeasing sets, all delivered in the medium of poor-quality film so that the entire production enjoys the same values - or lack of values - on as many levels as human effort would allow. In this, we have the concept behind Bizarro world, though one can see differences in that Waters' directed towards an adult audience and directed especial vehemence to suburban Baltimore of the Nixon era and Bizarro stories aimed at young readers.

In this mind-set, as someone who got the joke, I approached Tales of the Bizarro World, seeking out the legendary dementia of Weisinger-era absurdism in the context of Superman-franchise stories. Yet as I read the old unease returned, an unease essentially forgotten for almost thirty years. Bizarro stories assembled as humor the essential components of nightmare, treading in a territory familiar to those who may have noted that humor frequently looks at pain from a skewed viewpoint that can defang the chills.

Looked at bluntly, a world full of ugly and insane, yet identical humanoids, similar enough to humans to disturb yet not similar enough to respond to reason, where virtue stands inverted, where no one clearly recalls the meaning of the distinction between pleasure and pain - here we have something that Kafka or Burroughs would write about. Here we have the fundamental problem of Neville in Matheson's I Am Legend. And here we welcome visitors to the nightmarish Bizarro World.

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Column 204. Completed 12-DEC-2000.