Comics Reality Checks II: The Bouncing Boy Test

In a previous column (here), we explored establishing a criterion for worthwhile comics in the sense of pieces which might satisfy the Three Trashmen Tests. Having come to the conclusion that these tests, however valid, might still allow some really ripe pieces to slip by (including some of the worst that early Image Comics had to offer), such reasoning leads to the premise that an aesthetic theory of comics requires something more. For instance, where should we divide comics into the dismal and the sublime? To control for variables, we might investigate some on-going premise that, at least once, seriously seemed to have lost its way.

For sheer availability circa 2001 AD, DC Comics' Legion of Super-Heroes franchise provides much material from which an observer might glean certain forces working in comics. It has definitely suffered at least one (and probably more) troubled eras which could pass for artistic cluelessness. Furthermore, even to the casual collector, a broad range of pieces remain available and accessible, both before and after it lost its direction.

For this particular bit of research - with the aim of discovering a test whereby we can see a problem in the editorial definition of a comic or series of comics - we might look to the generational change that came when the Legion of Super-Heroes concept made a great leap into the seventies, providing the foundations for the immediately post-Silver Age, and subsequent, interpretations.

I can summarize the change very neatly. The eviction of Bouncing Boy, much like the iridium layer that denotes the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, marks the event. Before, he neatly reflected the standard of the material in which he moved; after, he represented an embarrassment for writers and readers aiming (misguidedly) for a more "mature" or "adult-oriented" model of comics.

Comics came, for a time, to have no place for the likes of Bouncing Boy, or his spiritual compatriots like Matter-Eater Lad. And, in that era, they also came to reel in the stupor of a kind of self-importance that pushed them to act as if some cosmic power would punish any creator who scripted or drew a comic book that did not depress the reader. A kind of dour Puritanism sank over the business, with talent traveling in fear that someone might catch them writing comics "for kids," and standards shifted to prove a kind of contrived adultness in producing a material inaccessible by intent to younger readers, in the process also driving away readers not especially fond of works that invited pessimism or despair at the human character. Whether observers of the medium recognize it or not, then, Bouncing Boy acted as a kind of Soul of Comics, and readers, sometimes, could note the loss of this soul in works after Bates and Cockrum decided to evict this character from his role in the Legion of Super-Heroes franchise.

With the sixties enjoying a surreally-silly Legion of Super-Heroes and a later day suffering through the despondent cloud of pieces like L.E.G.I.O.N. '90, we can note Bouncing Boy's place as a barometer of what comics may have become. And we can speculate that a comic has lost its way when it might collapse with the sudden appearance of Bouncing Boy, either serving as an avatar of Comics That Refuse to Take Themselves Too Seriously or simply as a voice speaking plainly to power.

Comics That Get Full of Themselves

Sometimes it pays to ask, "Could the writer get away with this story, if, in the middle of it all, Bouncing Boy started rebounding against the walls?" And, if the answer no comes to mind, "Would the story become more entertaining if Bouncing Boy wrecked it by intruding?" Indeed, one might judge the conceptual soundness of comics as comics by their ability to incorporate Bouncing Boy. Imagine, for example, the shattering effect the following exchange - in the obviously-doctored panels, below - might have had should Bouncing Boy have stepped out of an earlier Legion book and intruded into one of the solemn and fatalistic scenes in Moore's and Gibbons' Watchmen.

Even works which retain my approval after the passage of more than 20 years could do with some brightening up on this channel. For instance, if you recall the piece, consider the contents of Avengers Annual #7, where Jim Starlin finally closed (for a few years) the saga of the death of Adam Warlock, a hanging thread of the death of a superhero that Marvel could have allowed to hang indefinitely. Warlock, in the last throes of self-hatred, self-pity, and self-absorption, emoted out his last moments before a previous self come to steal his soul. The entire scene asked - no, begged - for the Great Blue-Black-and-White Hope to bounce into the room, say, "Aw, c'mon guys" (in a voice like Wally Cleaver), and bring the whole morbid exercise crashing down.

Again, at the end of Watchmen, Bouncing Boy could have turned the whole thing right again, removing that nasty feeling involved with a work featuring either flawed, corrupt, or insane heroes. Bouncing Boy would have pulled his human super ball stunt, knocked Ozymandias flat (either before or after he became the murderer of millions), and led him away to justice at the end of a chain, perhaps to appear in some future story involving a jailbreak of super-criminals. Ozymandias, furthermore, once confronted with the fundamental inflatable force we call Chuck Taine, would have to adopt a sour John Forte-style long face and own up to the overall insanity of his master plan, perhaps moments before he self-destructed.

And, perhaps, critics might choke to death at the cruel jangling of their nerves caused by such a discordant shift in tone. While I have a great deal of respect for Watchmen as a coherent work, my fantasy scenario above nonetheless suggests that something in the story model remains wanting: Through hundreds of pages of building tension, the work never really relieves that tension, since no event occurs to wipe clean the accelerating corruption of its principals, who wander, more and more deeply into gray areas. The only escape, really, comes to those whom the pseudo-benevolent Ozymandias deigns targets for his kind of murder-on-any-scale-the-plans-may-require.

Humor does not altogether absent itself from Watchmen, though generally it takes the form of irony rather than silliness (unlike, say, later works by the same author, such as various specimens within Tom Strong that, without shame or apology, dabble in the absurd). However, this pivotal work - and countless pages of weaker, if contemporaneous, material - strove so hard to prove its adulthood that, to a large degree, it sacrificed joy and wonder, as if cynicism served as some kind of irrefutable proof of maturity.

Grimness as Cardinal Virtue

As the voyages of Columbus serve as milestones for the European colonization of the New World, regardless of the efforts of previous travelers who may have touched these two continents before him or of the centuries before some portions of North or South America would ever host a resident of Old World ancestry, so would Watchmen mark the beginning of a generation of contrivedly-solemn, surly, and grim comics.

Art, generally speaking, deals in ideas and effects. To commit art to a single idea, such as "all things work out right," unnecessarily limits it, and can (and has) produced much tiresome and formulaic material that can make the consumer yearn both for something new and for something requiring more inner work from the creators. However, who considers the truth of the converse claim? In other words, the notion that man occupies a meaningless and helpless place in a universe dedicated (through processes such as entropy, but including anything handy) to his destruction and immiseration serves quite as well as a lame cliche and a shortcut for lazy creators.

The insulting pejorative term "pollyannaish" serves to disdain those who dare to adopt an optimistic posture in spite of the distaste which the jaded, burnt-out, and cynical may have for the ill-reputed practice of blowing sunshine. However, given the number of times and ways human beings have (both singly and in the collective) predicted horrible ends for themselves and others without ever living up to the potential of any of these studies in the art of hypothetical apocalypse, one might view our continued survival as a mild validation of optimism.

Leaving aside the disturbing possibility that everything may work out all right, however (since the idea seems annoying far beyond the specific tortures inherent in a happy ending), we can still examine the merits of a despondent posture. Does a world "where evil brings profit and virtue none at all¹" really make for a better story? Do the bad ends of tragedy, understood in the Aristotelean sense, show more real nuts-and-bolts realism than the happy endings of comedy?

I would venture forward the idea that the awkwardness of the forced happy endings in much cinema, theater, prose, poetry, mythology, and popular entertainment in general results less from an attempt to deny a law of physics that requires everything to go wrong and more from limitations of the human imagination. Begin with the prospect that a story can become more interesting as the writer gets his hero(es) into more and more trouble; add the perfectly plausible postulate that the resolution of trouble becomes more iffy and difficult in direct proportion to the increase in magnitude of this trouble; and you get an equation where many stories must twist the arm of the circumstances of previous acts or chapters in order to make the tally come up on the side of happiness or despair.

A previous Opinions feature (here) dealt with the question of realism as an artistic virtue, particularly in the context of comics as we understand them today (circa 2001). And if we assume that unquestioning pessimism represents no great intellectual advance over unquestioning optimism, and furthermore grant neither a greater plausibility, and continue with my own previous claim that the appeal and power of comics comes, at least in part, from their ability to dispense with the realistic, we rapidly run out of reasons why comics must depict the gloomy and despondent.

Despite pretenses and masquerades to the contrary, then, the gloom of comics represents no more than a convention or an expression of taste. As such, it takes no moral high ground whatsoever above optimism, even the sappiest; each approach has its own methods of avoiding critical thought, with blind faith and bad faith acting as a kind of dyad capable of dulling the imagination, intelligence, and morals of those who commit in excess to notions unsupported by empirical data.

Therefore, grimness may define a model or a comics, but it need not preempt the medium itself. Indeed, one could make a case just for the kind of absurdity this blue ball of justice embodies as a standard of comics.

Bouncing Boy and His Peers

For some, the essence of the innocence of comics appears in the form of Bouncing Boy. For those who distrust letting a single character represent an entire theory of comics, we could, perhaps, expand this definition to the Legion of Substitute Heroes. Either in the singular or in the collective, though, we can note that no one really intends anyone to take any of the entire conceptual side of the business seriously. This does not preclude, necessarily, the presence of Great Ideas in the comics in question; it does, however, make unlikely the kind of clenched-tooth stiff-muscled kind of sour and dour approach to the drawn page that some, once upon a time, considered the only reasonable standard.

Perhaps - and I admit this grudgingly - the use of a number of absurd-by-design adolescent superheroes has certain limitations in terms of creating stories. We can consider this as a logical inference from the finite ability to use superheroes of whatever stripe in stories; a subset of a finite subset must not contain more than the superset. However, used as an aesthetic barometer, such characters play a role sometimes much more useful than their second-banana functions within tales of a more competent, if less soulful, superhero group.

On the other hand, a number of uses to which Bouncing Boy or a similarly absurd creation could fit well within a comics work deemed substantial, important, or intellectually engaging do come to mind. For instance, corners exist in the canon of DC's Vertigo pieces into which the lad, however fully inflated, might fit; indeed, he would work with, rather than against, the tone of Morrison's Doom Patrol that appeared under that imprint. Given a conceptual model similar to that of its first series, Suicide Squad would also offer his like some place to appear before the reader (though, hopefully, not in the aspect of a piece of cannon fodder to kill off for impact, one of the housecleaning functions that title historically served and will very likely continue to serve in the near future).

Comics, after all, did not begin with the costumed superhero, although Bouncing Boy does originate from and belong in that genre. Readers too attached to the here and now of comics may think the predominant tone and themes of books when they first discovered comics must play the role of eternal standards for the form, but various styles of comics tend to have a finite lifespan or a tendency to depart and return in cycles. Bouncing Boy predates the kind of hypermasculine, posturing, cynical, unhappy, often mentally ill superhero that came of age in the 1980s and never completely went away again; he plays in almost-forgotten themes of the superhero as a typical specimen of Everyman, thrust by exceptional circumstances into exceptional abilities that invite him to grow into the role of the hero; and, in the process, he reminds us that heroism has more to do with character and less to do with the size of a hero's shoulder pads or his marketability as a GQ cover model.

He inflates like a blowfish, he bounces like a rubber ball, and he repels blows like a duck's back sheds water. Unlikely? Undignified? Beyond the reach of the toxic Cult of Cool? To some, such traits render him beyond the bounds of what comics means for them. But to me these qualities make a case for Bouncing Boy as a manifestation of the Soul of Comics. As such, a theory of comics that excludes his like has taken on the tone of a surly adolescent who rails at anything childlike in an immature attempt to prove his maturity.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at [email protected].

Column 268. Completed 02-SEP-2001.