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Previous columns in this series identify Batman, Superman, Fighting American, Spider-Man, and Power Man as exemplars of particular decades of comics. None of these claims run too afoul of conventional wisdom. Starting with the eighties, however, central premises began to fragment. Obvious answers exist for later decades, but do they rest on sound premises?
![[Reuben Flagg, the Tom Cruise of superheroes.]](../img/pr2901.jpg)
Many names seem to satisfy the question: "What superhero best represents his decade of origin?" Conventional theories of comics, based in part by market shares and in part by the reminiscences of professionals who probably remember more than they care to tell, tend to over-represent the role of dark tone and heroes stripped of the high ideals that typified the Silver Age of DC comics. In spite of this conventional version of the comics history of the eighties, the canonical heroes that allege to best represent that decade fail in a number of particulars. Instead, the period seems best portrayed by an obscure hero from a creator-owned title; in many ways, Reuben Flagg of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg stands as the best example of a hero who echoes the era he produced him and suggests the comics medium of his day.
Name recognition, popularity, and conventional comics history that ignores key elements of the culture at large in focusing on particulars all serve to suggest other characters as the stuff of the eighties. For instance, characters like Wolverine or the Punisher came into their own in the eighties, and much represent the antihero theme that many associate with that period of comics. Alternately, some might see the derivative superheroes of Moore and Gibbon's Watchmen as the best examples of the eighties superhero.
Two flaws, to this writer, seem apparent in such choices. First, all the aforementioned characters owe their essences to previous periods of comics. For instance, Punisher belongs in a context of the period when he first appeared, an era of "Death Wish" movies and neo-pulp series novels like the Executioner and Destroyer books. Wolverine, as well, belongs at least halfway in the superheroics of the bizarre that distinguished Marvel from DC in and immediately after the Silver Age; his antiheroic character represented a variant approach to material not new in the eighties. Both characters owed much, either in baseline concept or accrued detail, to predecessors ("Recycling Bin" columns discuss the likely models for Wolverine and the Punisher). This applies even more so to the heroes in Watchmen, a stable derived from Charlton creations of the sixties; Alan Moore made them seem native to the eighties by placing them in situations designed to sandblast off the heroes' pretensions to iconic heroism.
The second objection has to do with the tone of the times, both in and outside of comics. Even if figures like Rorshach and the Punisher represent the tone of the comics of the eighties well - and such claims center on titles like Dreadstar, Watchmen, Miracleman and their tone-heavy kindred, while conveniently overlooking equally period pieces like Nexus - they poorly reflect the times themselves. The despairing, sometimes nihilistic tone of the comics of the eighties belongs more to the gray years of the post-Nixon seventies or the doom-saying days after the turn of the nineties. Whether one finds it endearing or annoying, the eighties in America enjoyed a long-lived optimism that didn't completely dissipate until the last years of George Bush's term as President. To leave out optimism when discussing the eighties seems less like an oversight and more like revisionism.
For many, but not all (and here we obviously exclude the likes of Oliver Stone, who never allowed his growing success to cause him to lighten up), the eighties offered considerable promise. Not everyone believed in this promise, not everyone availed themselves of it, and not everyone kept the benefits it produced, but to describe the eighties as a time of uniform and relentless despair seems like describing the sixties with only the assassination of Kennedy as an example, casually discarding promising events like the apparent vitality of the Kennedy presidency or the culmination of the sixties in the first moon landing. If the notion of an optimistic eighties seems too distasteful, you can still acknowledge the phenomenon by calling it "denial."
This represented a real break with the tone of the late sixties and the whole of the seventies, when doomsayers and pessimistic prognosticators straight-facedly made claims like the inevitable destruction of Britain by famine before 1990 (Dr. Paul Erlich) and the immanent onset of a new ice age (various official voices of the fledgling science of climate change). Public-service advertisements in America told of the certain exhaustion of oil supplies by 1985, and more people worldwide could relate to the cynicism of Malthus than to the numerous utopians who rose after Malthus preemptively tried to undermine all flavors of utopianism.
Ideology probably did little to drive the massive rejection of doomsaying and the zeitgeist that inspired it. People simply knew two things: the culture of naysayers hadn't seemed to improve anything, and the stomach for pessimism knew limits. Sick of the gloom, many chose to ignore it altogether. If recovering the lost spark of hope meant nullifying the times since it had passed from currency, many people judged the benefits worth the costs.
If political reaction regained some small credibility in the eighties, it did so by the default of other viewpoints, and reflected a broader cultural tendency to abandon the failed experiments that had defined, then cluttered, the sixties and seventies.
In art, like politics, enjoys its own flavor of reaction. This tendency expresses itself in certain approaches that fit under the vague heading of "minimalism." In music, both punk rock and fifties-retro tried to carve away the barnacles of decadent ornamentation that sometimes tried to replace the object with its gimmicks and decorations. Even acts that once represented a cutting edge to music tended, in the eighties, to look towards essences rather than ornaments - compare the decadent excesses found in the "art rock" of the seventies to the sparsity of approach in early Cure pieces, and there you find minimalism.
Minimalism even reached the superhero, at least in the person of Reuben Flagg.
While Vanth Dreadstar represented one type of seventies superhero dragged into the eighties, and Nexus played the role of eighties superhero with its dress code intact, Reuben Flagg, in the pages of American Flagg, represented a minimalist hero stripped of those things a hero does not need.
The garish costumes, impossible origins, absurd powers, and much of the debris of the now-decadent idioms of the Silver Age all fell away in Howard Chaykin's design of the character. American Flagg didn't even try to hold on to a decadent model; Reuben Flagg abandoned the baggage of the sixties and seventies in precisely the way a subset of Western culture attempted to do.
He kept enough to fit, with minor modification, into any era of superhero comics, given an appropriate tailor. The essence nonetheless remained the minimal hero: an exceptional man of considerable gifts whom character or circumstance forces to rise to confront the demons that assail his times.
Take a central fixture of the Silver Age - perhaps Green Lantern, for example - and sand away the gimmickry, the powers, the costumes, and the posturing, and what remains fits the definition of the previous paragraph. Superhero comics had, after all, become buried in unnecessary ornaments like decades of hard continuity; pious but unpragmatic codes of conduct; various attempts to turn the superhero on his head or break him down to debris; efforts to make heroes more humane through drowning in human weaknesses (which a hero need not actually lack; but his nature inclines him to tame or overcome such things, not submit to them); and a heavy baggage that stood in the way of storytelling and entertaining.
When the people of Gordium told Alexander the Great that no man could rule them who could not undo a knotted rope, he cut it. Similarly, the minimalist approach aims to eliminate the pointless and unnecessary. So, then, did Reuben Flagg appear to show the kernel of heroism.
![[Reuben Flagg, as others must have seen him.]](../img/pr2902.jpg)
Superheroes of the sixties and seventies frequently took themselves far too seriously. Either they aspired to a hopeless perfection that appeared absurd even in places where men wore tights and flew; or they attempted to bring that very concept down to earth by overblown histrionics that would become a much-abused cliche of the comics that would follow. They wallowed either in self-righteousness or in some flavor of sickly angst.
Flagg, for his part, did partake somewhat in the complacency one might expect of a comic-book hero. Some of this defines the character, serving as a trait rather than a convention or a perquisite of the role. Flagg began his comics career as a failed movie actor who took work in the security industry after the collapse of his celluloid career. His complacency provides a storytelling hook, since it serves as a target for the events of various plot lines. Each time that Flagg puffed up like a blowfish over some real or imagined success, something happened to deflate him, but his heroic essence turned these situations to ongoing nuisances rather than grounds for a sickening and self-indulgent despair that might plague superheroes who worked for the Big Two publishers. Flagg's failure in both pomposity and angst made him contrast with the heroes of the sixties, without requiring the cynicism that sometimes separated superheroes of the sixties from their then-dated antecedents.
The lack of a repertoire of fantastic, magical, or pseudoscientific special abilities much helped Flagg play the role of hero. Superman, for instance, shows nothing heroic when he steps in front of a stream of bullets that everyone but the assailant knows can do him no harm. Because Superman can't fail, he can't succeed either. Heroism, however, requires a certain grit in the face of almost-certain (or at least possible) failure. Flagg had the normal human limitations of mortality, vulnerability, and an ego that ill-esteem or failure could bruise. All this, plus his vanity and pathological womanizing, gave him a number of innate obstacles to overcome on his way from crisis to victory. While the occasional gem might drop into his lap (as did a variety of premium females), Flagg could not count on this. He had to resort to wits and persistence in a way unfamiliar to those beings who can casually shoulder aside planets.
A minimalist hero has just those traits that a hero needs. Since a flawless hero does not compel - he doesn't even provide someone with whom a reader can relate - we should expect a minimalist hero to enjoy a healthy set of personal faults.
To the hero, the super represents the tool, but the man provides the heroism. In a real sense, the human side provides much of the entertainment in a story. A comic that shows a building collapsing from the outside, followed by headlines of the deaths that resulted, has a plot but no story. A comic that follows someone who witnessed the event from the inside (whether as a survivor or as a casualty) has the story to go with the plot. The events of the story mainly provide a mirror off which to bounce the important personalities who participate, and personalities reflect more interesting material when invested with a key amount of imperfection.
The hero becomes more amusing when something cracks the unrealistic stoic facade that his success sometimes requires him to maintain. Put in cleaner language, The flaw makes the man.
As examples, consider the success of Dennis O'Neil's work humanizing characters like Superman, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow. His work, or later pieces that built upon the precedents he established, contains many of the key moments that endear a reader to the various characters involved. Where, after all, does Superman most live up to his name - when he returns Lex Luthor to the prison cell at the end of the issue (exactly as we expected) to gloat at another cream puff victory, or when he said goodbye to Lois Lane immediately prior to giving up his life to end Doomsday's rampage in Metropolis? Did Green Lantern most demonstrate heroism when smirking over his latest defeat of Sinestro, or when confronting his own arrogance under the guidance of Green Arrow as an ethical referee?
A certain amount of vice throws the heroism of a character into relief. Randall Flagg's vanity, his rampant womanizing, his cluelessness in the face of situations everyone else understands, his boyish looks and thoroughly adult corruption, all combine to create a picture of considerable charm.
I can expect, and perhaps deserve, a certain amount of disagreement for proposing a contrarian view of the eighties hero. Conventional wisdom and considerable professional opinion support the claim that the nihilistic noir tones of pieces like Watchmen, which rasped the idealism away from superheroes and rubbed gloom into the wounds, provide the undeniable exemplar of eighties heroism.
For me, memory of those times, a period I spent away from comics, gives me a view that allows an unbiased assessment of eighties material as I see it for the first time. Too many things come together in Chaykin's Reuben Flagg that implicate the eighties with a clarity in ways that Watchmen does not.
The difference in scope suggests the source of the disagreement. One can't really argue that Watchmen and its relatives represent the best-remembered comics of the eighties, and perhaps Watchmen itself presents the truest classic work of that decade (though Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns must always nip at its heels).
I have to judge the race on criteria other than consensus and commercial success, though. With more than one strain representing the comics of the eighties, even if one contending approach remains poorly remembered, two questions arise. First, does the piece stand well for the comics of its day? American Flagg and Watchmen both can elicit the answer "yes" to this question. Second, however, does the piece reflect the times which produced it? American Flagg meets this test better than other pieces, and suggests the independent and creator-owned comics just becoming important, and captures the tenor of its day.
Such reasoning puts gloomy pieces out of the running. They feel much more like 1974 than 1984.
Return to the Quarter Bin.