What Price for Realism?

When people view the state of comics today and compare it to the comics of a previous generation, some differences definitely occur to the observer. When debating the virtues of comics in 1965 versus comics in 1995 (and beyond), the advocates of one generation frequently find the material of the other wanting in a number of key respects.

When comics modernists argue against the material of the Golden Age or of the Silver Age of comics, they frequently resort to claims that the older material, as a general rule, lacked realism. The word realism itself carries considerable power; to admit that a comic lacks it often amounts to admitting that the comic altogether lacks merit.

Yet where we concede such arguments by default (on those occasions where we accept "realism" as a virtue), have we laid the necessary intellectual groundwork to justify our positions? Have we accepted the merits of realism by reflex or by default, without ever considering the matter in depth?

Indeed, have we considered the question of what the term realism means when we declare it a virtue of comics?

In general, we allow a number of properties, aspects, and traits to conceal themselves under the blanket of the "realism" label. And, not surprisingly, not all appear so important when we corral them into the light to view them as separate merits.

What "Reality" Would Involve

So many conventions of comics - and not just superhero comics - violate fundamental precepts of common sense that one could make an excellent case for realism as an inherently anti-comics standard. From a very early day, the use of drawn rather than photographed images allowed creators to draw as much (or more) from the imagination as from life; and, should we impose a realistic set of canons on comics, we begin to corral them into territory already owned by news, history, nonfiction, photography, and other arts and sciences of considerable worth but with which comics can not easily compete.

For many genres, the unlikely, the fantastic, the ridiculous, and the impossible define comics.

However, let us step back a bit from the argument. We can cultivate our dispassion with the knowledge that hyper-realism has yet to make a serious inroad into known genres of comics, even if anecdotal detail work can touch on the occasionally realistic. Secondly, hyper-realistic comics could entertain in the same fashion that other realistic arts and sciences do.

One thing tends to boil to the surface in deep thought about the role of "realism" in comics: Realism, as demanded by a number of comics fans, tends to refer to a generally narrow and focused kind of real-world reference that does not necessarily touch on principal conventions of comics. Calls for realism generally mean calling to realism in specific aspect rather than in general.

Some indicative examples follow, each item representing a type of deviation from conventional or statistical norms in comics. To create a realistic comics, creators might need to steer clear of any of the following hazards.

Distorted or Exaggerated Anatomy

Artists, rather than writers, tend to take the rap on this one for obvious reasons: They control the dimensions, positioning, and general physical aspects of the material they depict, whether in a manner consistent with the desires of writers or not.

When people criticize comics artists, they generally do not get far from claims about the distorted quality of anatomy before they reach other, more purely aesthetic, objections. In my own wasted youth, I altogether wrote off as misguided non-talents figures such as Jack Kirby and Frank Miller for just such considerations; after having tastes shaped mostly by Neal Adams and a number of his contemporaries, I lacked the ability to appreciate art without a certain respect for human proportions.

As a general rule, a good cartoonist should understand certain rules of realistic depiction. Here, as in various aspects of art (and, indeed, even life) the principle "Know the rules before you attempt to break them" applies.

Consider, however, that a cartoonist needs to accomplish more than a simple literalism in his interpretation of human faces and bodies. Gil Kane tended to draw the human form with heads somewhat too small for naturalistic proportion; John Byrne tended to draw many human bodies too slender; and a number of lesser lights of the business might have hit their head-to-height ratios on the mark consistently without achieving the kind of aesthetic validity that attach to either of the aforementioned names.

Some folks do have a preference for more realistic anatomy, but we can't truly assume this applies to popular culture in general. Hollywood, for one example, generally closes the doors of opportunity to females who belong, anatomically, anywhere near the center of the bell curve; together with fashion designers, moviemakers tend to treat anything larger than a size two as morbidly obese, favoring a look somewhere between cancer patient or concentration camp resident,plus some minor improvements via saline implants, nose jobs, collagen lip work, and anything but the female form provided by Nature. For men, the burden falls somewhat less extremely, but leading men must nonetheless remain somewhat underweight to retain their visual appeal. None of this justifies an anatomical distortion (assuming such reworking of natural proportion actually requires justification), but the tolerance of improbable bodies throughout mass entertainments suggests that, perhaps, unlikely measurements do not induce the kind of suffering which some observers of comics claim burdens them.

Anatomical distortion, like the skin-tight costume, belongs among superhero comics conventions but does not represent a necessary element. Both components could vanish and leave a body of work that clearly implicated its antecedents. If only anecdotally, however, comics - even the principal offender, superhero comics - have experimented with the occasional character without model-quality looks. Someday, perhaps, audiences will appreciate a hero no handsomer than the Mole Man, without a flat stomach or rippling abdominals. Perhaps they might even come to appreciate females with legs less than 11 heads long, un-wasplike waists, and un-enormous bosoms. With some of the visual appeal and some of the wish-fulfillment through proxy elements still serving to draw readers into comics, however, we shouldn't expect this any time soon.

Funny Speech Patterns

Comics characters tend to speak in fashions often unlike what we might expect from real people. They often say things in ways we might not hear from a normal person; they say things that sound funny because they describe things normal people never talk about (and therefore have no conventional usage to follow in such situations); and they often shape their speech to the rules prescribed by the Comics Code Authority.

Peculiar patterns of speech belong among the respectable conventions of the form, particularly in superhero comics. Certain character types even have their own pseudo-dialects. Nick Fury and the Thing often speak in "comics curmudgeon," which uses much slang, colorful turn of phrase, and frequent (generally non-obscene) expletives; Superman and Captain America often speak in "comics gallant," which avoids slang, vulgarism, and general impoliteness with a use of language somewhat suggestive of the presidential speeches of John Kennedy; Doctor Doom, Thanos, Dormammu, and countless others speak with a common pattern we could designate "evil overlord," which tends to combine an intelligent (or even elitist) use of language with frequent outbursts of contempt or manifest arrogance. Few of these patterns, however, accurately replicate the true patterns of speech we might observe in the closest analogs such characters have in the real world. To object to this language misses the point. The bloviated and bombastic locutions serve a purpose much like the ridiculous wardrobe and overstated body language in comics: They spice things up, deliberately distorting the commonplace or familiar into something more adrenal. The change intends to make things more interesting. A comics dialogue that borrowed too heavily from transcribed human speech would not read especially smoothly, with the many semantics-free expletives ("err....uhh...") and repeated requests to repeat and clarify until both parties understand what one of them attempts to say.

To the second objection about comics dialogue: How does one describe a completely unrealistic situation with casual and natural-sounding language? For instance, try, as an exercise, rephrasing the following statement until all the unlikely knobs and spurs of uncommon usage become smooth and slick: "The Anti-Monitor has destroyed all the alternate earths but five, and these currently only tenuously survive as a single, consolidated world that amalgamates the histories of the five worlds that went into the mixture." Try rephrasing it in a few ways. Try simple speech to tell a three-year old. Try folksy speech. Try whatever lexicon you may use in day-to-day speech. Do any of these approaches allow you a lexicon that adequately covers the concepts in this unlikely and dysphonious little blurb about one chapter of Crisis on Infinite Earths?

Also, the last set of objections about the unreality of dialogue in comics often refer to a bowdlerized lexicon that fails to provide a jolting dose of the four-letter Anglo-Saxon terms that sometimes spill out of our own mouths. I've heard a claim somewhere that no one ever got up and left a movie because the dialogue didn't contain enough profanity. For the dialogue realist, however, this oversight seems like an affront. A liberal usage of profanity, however, would do little to improve dialogue in comics. Conversely, it would make it rather low-brow, limiting the adjectives to a small handful of adjectives that serve a variety of purposes without saying much. Very occasionally, some gifted soul can use profanity as a palette with which to paint very amazing verbal canvases. More often, however, introducing too much of it into comics dialogue would make the verbiage crass, dense, and repetitive. After the first few panels of a fight between the Thing and the Hulk, during which they generously shared the f-word and s-word with each other, the amusement would wear off, leaving little more than a scene with two odd-looking kids with potty mouth.

Weird Taste in Clothing

A number of previous columns detail the odd conventions of dress peculiar to superhero comics (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here - evidently a popular theme around these parts). If you can't attend a coronation in it, go to jury duty in it, mow the lawn in it, paint the house in it, dance in it, toss a javelin in it, and risk raised eyebrows going to a Hallowe'en party or to play a rock concert in it, odds are you have encountered some truly outrageous clothing. Such describes what superheroes wear. We might note, for brevity, that we best describe the dress code of comics - naturally, with superhero fare as the premier offender - as weird.

The wardrobe one sees in comics includes all manner of crimes against aesthetics, rendered in cloth, and stretched over unlikely physical forms. While such costumes seem particularly unwieldy and unlikely choices of outfitting for persons who may have to spend much of their professional lives running or fighting or catching walls that fall down, unreality per se does not seem like the real source of the objection.

The big black leather overcoats (and matching ensembles underneath) which one sees in action movies these days ("The Matrix," "Blade," "Vampires," and doubtless too many others to bother attempting to catalogue) do not seem like the likeliest outfits in which to engage in heavy exertion, either. The gowns actresses wear to awards ceremonies and film openings would become burdensome should one need to mow the lawn while wearing one, regardless of the high esteem which its designer enjoys. And a generation of disco wear, through various schools of dance music, would present as absurd a wardrobe as several years of comics.

Arguments against the unlikeliness of superhero comics strike me as red herrings for a number of reasons. First, the core premises behind superheroes involve ideas much more likely than any particular combination of cloth that one might ever see on someone's back: I would expect to see hundreds of people in Superman costumes before ever seeing anyone replicate one of his super-powered stunts. Furthermore, such objections often travel in the company of a litany of notions derived from the current version of the cult of cool. Putting a superhero in a big flannel shirt, baggy pants, a nose ring, tattoos, and a stocking cap (instead of circus tights and a cape) might to some seem more realistic, but in both cases the hero would wear a contrived uniform based on a convention created to identify some kind of human subculture. Both outfits would demonstrate a simulated, cultivated image rather than a naturally-derived, organic one. Both outfits, furthermore, would represent poses. However, the grunge-poser outfit would, to some, seem more real because it represented a kind of artificialness readily available in the real world.

Comics, even superhero comics, do not need the circus-tights type costume. A combination of factors, including the publishers' desire to show off the ability to do four-color printing in the early comics by clothing characters in garish color and artists' desire to streamline the art by drawing something more like a nude human form (rather than a form draped by the folds of realistic clothing) created the costume. Making it go away would not make comics more realistic.

All-Around Peculiar Behavior

Comics characters do act funny. We would have little to read if they did not. Imagine, if you will, a comic where nothing happened beyond the Thing or Guy Gardner sitting on a sofa watching NASCAR racing on a cable sports channel. A talented writer might make something of the sort interesting, but only occasionally, as a change of pace. Pretty soon, readers would begin to dread panel after panel of a hero sitting on the couch, reaching for the beer and Doritos, or operating the remote to shut off the sound during commercials. Yet in doing all of these things, the hero would act realistically.

Once we take the hero off the sofa and reintroduce him into his native environment of conflicts between himself and others of his kind, we get into all kinds of unlikely behavior, activities driven less by the laws of physics or the burdens of inherited continuity and more by the demands of the story. Experienced storytellers recognize, in their art, the recurring necessity of diversion from the likely to the useful, in such key elements as ways of getting characters into trouble, ways of having characters interact with trouble, ways to resolve trouble, and ways to provide just deserts all around. Here we might make a distinction between the "realistic" and the "credible;" the former fits understood laws of how things work in the real world, and the latter fits the understood laws of how things work within the story. Realism may enhance credibility, but it doesn't have to; the logic of the story will determine whether realism plays the role of a bedrock assumption of a tale or as an unwanted intruder.

Superheroes and the supporting cast that surround them, as well as the characters in the multiple and esteemed other genres of the form, often behave in ways that we might not expect of the man who sells us a Super Big Gulp, or the policeman who merrily writes us enormous tickets, or of the citizen with whom we brush shoulders in the street. Fairly enough, we can implicate their behavior as unlikely, and, yes, unrealistic. Given the unrealistic scenarios comics characters, especially superheroes, act out, and the somewhat unlikely definitions of these characters themselves, should we view this departure from a both-feet-firmly-on-the-ground worldview as a weakness, or as a consistency with the setting?

It becomes more difficult to define realistic and unrealistic personalities as we graft more and more fantastic properties to a character, however. Add into this mix characters from other planets, beings manufactured rather than born, and various persons changed in remarkable ways by accidents of nature or by the intent of sentient forces, and we have a brew of extremely unlikely personages who we would expect to behave oddly simply on the principle that a) they face situations no one has ever faced before or b) they lack the personal experience to have any prior rehearsals in the scenarios they encounter.

Dubious Clean Living

Comics characters, especially superheroes, do sometimes subscribe to moral codes that some readers find either too restrictive or altogether irrelevant. A combination of historical factors brought about the general superheroic ethos; editorial concern about providing edifying reading matter more likely to inculcate something like morality in readers, publisher concern about delivering material made lurid by loving depictions of graphic violence, and the mechanics of contained stories all contributed to the Golden and Silver Age models of superheroes.

Think, for example, to the certain Weisinger-era Superman story formulae. We have the story where Superman gives his word to some criminal and finds hairsplitting ways to flout the intent, allowing Superman to retain his integrity as a crimefighter and an honest man at the same time. We also have the recurring tale where the scientist Luthor escapes from prison, pulls some stunt, fails to succeed in his plan thanks to the intervention of his nemesis Superman, and ends the story cursing Superman from the same old prison cell. One might ask two questions here: Why didn't Superman just lie to the previous figure(s) and perhaps arrange for Luthor to have a fatal accident to get him out of his hair?

A line exists, in western culture, between gallantry and cynicism as it relates to dealing with wrong-doers. On one extreme, we have advocates of mercy who might refuse to act with lethal force because of the seeming inherent unfairness of confronting lesser power with intent to kill; even when acting for a cause one could recognize as just, the moral imperative not to bully tends to limit the degree to which the righter of wrongs can apply violence. On the other extreme, we have the cold slayer of wrongdoers, who recognizes justice as contrary to laws of nature, as something men have to create through decisive action, and who see acts of mercy to wrongdoers as acts of cruelty to future victims of these wrongdoers.

Unlikely Chastity

As much as we resist dealing with the fact, some proportion of the people we encounter every day do not have very active sex lives. More startlingly, some like it that way. A moment's thought dispels the cognitive dissonance that might attend such an idea; after all, many drawbacks beset a life overflowing with sexual activity. Boredom, venereal disease, emotional upset, unwanted pregnancy, abandonment, ruined interpersonal relationships, and a host of other consequences can attend lives marked by more sexual adventurism than common sense.

However, the occasional reader takes a sexless tale as something of an affront. Examine objections like "No one lives like that," or, more vehemently, "No one can live like that," and you see someone annoyed by the notion of a sexless life.

Such arguments also depend somewhat on misunderstanding. Comics do not necessarily depict (in brilliant color and excruciating close-up) the sexual activity of heroes. This does not necessarily indicate a completely celibate life; it need only mean that the emphasis of the story lies elsewhere. Comics seldom get out the electron micrograph to depict the digestive activities of characters, either, but we need not take this to mean that none of them ever eat, digest, or excrete. And we certainly need not become agitated that the absence of such depictions represents some kind of indirect accusation against our own character.

We might also note, mainly as a footnote, that more sexual content does not necessarily mean more realism. The various art forms, when they dabble in erotica, frequently depart quite far from the experience of normal human beings, primarily in the depiction of an unnaturally abundant and improbably trouble-free access to sex which does not reflect the actual condition of most human beings. If one can fail to tell the truth by leaving sex out, so too can one lie by including too much. Some people live in the rain forest, and others live in the desert; but much of the world lives in the plains. A one-size-fits-all approach will, axiomatically, deviate from reality because access and desire differ from person to person.

Impossible Moral Standards

Aside from the sexual angle - an aspect of our lives known to generate considerable irrational thinking and emotive illogic - comic book characters frequently live by moral codes that, to many, represent a pinnacle of self-deception and, thereby, seem to insult the reader.

Nonetheless, demanding a certain minimum level of moral looseness (again, using the term without the sexual connotations) does not always do justice to the heroic concept. Real men lived by moral standards that others wouldn't begin to try to emulate. Consider, for example, Mohandas J. Gandhi.

While a character needs a fundamental minimum of humanness in order to connect with a thoroughly human reader, we need not insist this means he can't excel in his moral aspect. The drive to achieve something better marks the movers and shakers of culture, politics, religion, and art. We denigrate or forbid such striving at our own peril.

Especially given the fantastic in comics - meaning "pertaining to fantasies" - comics frequently attempt to present the lives or roles we wished we had as well as sometimes introducing a realistic element that might describe the lives we actually lead. Somewhere between these two poles may lay the happy medium that best serves to connect them.

Watered-Down Violence

Violence seems to go in and out of fashion in comics. Nor do comics deal in a single form of violence. Some advocates of realism, when they invoke this purported virtue, intend us to understand that they object to a violence that does not share with the reader all the fine detail of damaged tissue, spilled blood, and dismemberment. However, depending on the genre and storytelling purpose, different kinds of violence come into play.

Slapstick violence has its own rules. In general, in slapstick the violence attacks the self-esteem and inflated dignity of the character. Thus, a slapstick bomb may blow off the seat of a hero's pants, exposing his pimply behind to the elements. Such violence can, upon occasion, involve the injuries and bandages typical of real wounds, or even an untimely trip to the cemetery; but it serves a central purpose of making someone look ridiculous rather than the damage per se. In slapstick, the violence serves as tool to the greater purpose of undermining dignity.

Spandexed roughhousing, on the other hand, intends to serve as a kind of eye-candy, providing a vehicle to deliver big sound effects, cool fighting poses, improbable martial soliloquies, totalled stray objects, and, occasionally, a torn or shredded costume. In this sense, we can consider it in the same family as dance: human motion presented to entertain. Fights in superhero comics don't necessarily resolve anything because they don't necessarily have to. The relationship between plot and fight scene typically works the other way; the plot delivers the fight scenes, rather than the fight scenes serving the plot.

Understated violence, such as sequences that begin with machine guns blazing into something off-panel, then conclude with the silhouette of a body lying in a heap, characterized about a generation of comics in their approach to lethal violence. Here, again, we have two forces at work: the desire to portray and the desire to keep such portrayals from inducing too much disgust. In this kind of violence, we frequently do have damaging physical acts which serve the story; and, if they serve to define the character of the perpetrator(s) or instigator(s), they need not appear in excruciating detail.

Ultra-violence, as we might call a latter-day approach to comics violence, combines elements of spandexed roughhousing with a lurid attention to detail. However, we definitely have a saltier product here. Ultra-violence serves the aesthetic needs of artists to show meat separating from bone, blood spraying out from a point of impact, even internal organs spurting out from burst bodies. Severed heads rolling like golf balls exist on a fairly tame end of the spectrum.

This latter approach to violence, sometimes, reflects what some mean when they wish for a more realistic comics. However, the manifold distortions necessary to contrive a theater to deliver a red-splattered storm of death for someone's entertainment often represent much less realistic material than a story where no one does worse than hit each other while dressed in early-1900s circus attire.

Unlikely Resolutions

In the real world, things don't neatly resolve after the passage of twenty pages, clearing the stage for the events of the next issue. Even simple and trivial events can spawn consequences that persist into the indefinite future and through the entire passage of human lifetimes.

Therefore, the frequent ending of too many comics to count - with the good guys smiling and the bad guys in jail and nothing really any different than when the story began - represents another unreal element that advocates of a more realistic medium would prefer not to persist in the material they choose to patronize.

If we impose a realistic ending on comics stories, however, we lose a number of literary devices that make stories more satisfying. We lose the ability to inflict poetic justice on characters, taking away the cathartic elements of tragedy; with such a standard applied to literary works, in one stroke we would lose most of the canon of drama. Furthermore, with many comics outside of humor comics dealing with heroes thrust into problems that they ultimately must overcome, we impose, with one stroke, a rapid doom for intrepid adventurers whom actuarial tables would predict should have died a long time ago from the various occupational hazards of their professions. In more superhero-specific terms, if villains got away with things as often as occurs in the real world, the resulting comics would resemble something out of Kafka, with a confused and despairing hero unable by any of his inherent abilities to do anything about the situations developing around him.

A sophisticated readership may find a place for such pieces. It would do great injustice to the form to impose a realistic level of failure and despair to comics to the detriment of the content and to the loss of the reader, however.

Unreality as a Central Virtue of Comics?

The previous set of flaws could well condemn an art form to irrelevance and aesthetic inviability, should realism come to play the role of a central virtue of comics. However, thinking about the whole matter another way, should we look at the aforementioned attributes as flaws, or failings - or should we look at them as characteristics, deliberately introduced into the form for a purpose and with the intent of serving some creative principle?

If comics excelled at presenting realistic material, they would have displaced forms like photojournalism generations ago, But one very central appeal of comics rests in their ability to escape the predictable, the plausible, the normal, the realistic.

Particularly in the first eighty years of the twentieth century, certain visual treatments could only occur with any credibility within the context of art rendered by human hands, meaning the familiar tools of pencil, pen, and paint. If multi-megabuck Hollywood excess-extravaganzas now can offer visuals that make the offerings of comics seem tame and dowdy, we should nonetheless recognize this as a recent development from advances in special effects and creative financing.

And, in a sense, a close cousin to comics serves a seminal function in cinematic efforts, since storyboarding shares many central traits and skills with what we call comics.

Back to the central point, though, comics, as such, do not compete well with photographic media and related technologies in terms of accurately reproducing images of the objective world. Through most of the history of comics, cartoonists understood this and did not attempt to impose photographic virtues on a product of paper, graphite, ink, and paint. A camera can capture in an instant (with luck) what conscious design might take indefinite spans of time to achieve.

Where comics thrived, they did so in contexts where they could deviate from, not replicate, reality. They served as an outlet for imagination rather than as a photographic plate; and in that they enjoyed their greatest purpose and greatest strength.

In terms of story, credibility does mean something, and the various traits we mean when we use the term "reality" help build such credibility. However, as far as we may consider comics, realism serves more as a tool than as a purpose.

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Column 250. Completed 06-May-2001.