THE MAHERS-MALLOW CHALLENGE

I confess that I'd never heard of the "Marshmallow Challenge" until I decided to construct a pun combining "marshmallow" with the name of Stan Lee's recent assailant Bill Maher. The "challenge" phrase suits the pun, though, since Bill Maher's comments were intended, however stupidly, to challenge the idea that a comic-book creator could be of any importance to American culture.

Here's Maher's screed from November 17, 2018:

The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning. Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess. Someone on Reddit posted, “I'm so incredibly grateful I lived in a world that included Stan Lee.” Personally, I’m grateful I lived in a world that included oxygen and trees, but to each his own. Now, I have nothing against comic books – I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures. 
But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people – some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it “adulting,” and act like it’s some giant struggle. 
I’m not saying we’ve necessarily gotten stupider. The average Joe is smarter in a lot of ways than he was in, say, the 1940s, when a big night out was a Three Stooges short and a Carmen Miranda musical. The problem is, we’re using our smarts on stupid stuff. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important. 

Many, many fans leaped to Lee's defense, and in the last week Maher simply reiterated his comments, adding the rather wimpy clarification that he wasn't attacking Stan Lee, only his fans. Of course, if you're stating that the recently deceased celebrity under discussion produced nothing but juvenile trash, I think that might be deemed something of an intentional burn.

The thing I find most interesting about Maher's attack is how OLD it sounds. Maher sounds like a lot of the modernist writers of the early 20th century-- such as Nathaniel West and Joseph Conrad-- and the equally modernist critics of that period, such as Theodor Adorno. Yet Maher is a baby-boomer like myself, having been born in 1956, one year after I was. His obvious prejudice toward books that don't have pictures similarly sounds like the tendency of early modernists to privilege words, words, and more words over any medium that used visual elements.

Of course, Maher isn't unique among baby-boomers in choosing to chastise popular culture for not getting across the elitist message. I've frequently castigated the fallacies promoted by similarly aged critics like Gary Groth and Noah Berlatsky. But, whatever their mistakes, these critics at least know something about popular culture.

Maher, for all his pretensions to intellectual superiority, apparently did zero research as to how comic books attained a measure of cultural acceptance, as opposed to remaining, as Maher thinks they should, a marginal medium meant only for kids. Since he doesn't think he needs to provide historical context, he's free to claim that the sea-change in which adults chose not to give up kid stuff happened twenty years previous to 2018.

So that's 1998, in which happened-- what exactly? It's long after the first flowerings of the "graphic novel" in the mid-1980s. Even the debut of Image Comics was old news by 1998, while in that year Hollywood had yet to invest heavily in more than a handful of comics-characters. Perhaps the late nineties are supposed to be the period in which college professors are supposed to have started writing essays on comic book characters. But even if Maher has some specific thesis in mind-- I for one have no idea if his "Silver Surfer" essay-title is supposed to be real or not-- college professors certainly don't write their high-falutin' essays in isolation from the rest of their culture.

Better informed histories of popular culture generally peg the sea-change as beginning over forty years earlier, in the 1960s-- though even this assessment overlooks the slow process by which academia began showing tentative acceptance of pop culture in the forties and fifties, as per critics like Gilbert Seldes and Robert Warshow. But three events in the 1960s provide watershed moments: the growth of comics-fandom in the form of adults collecting old funnybooks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the debut of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, and Stan Lee's development of Marvel Comics in 1961.

I doubt that in 1961 Lee had any idea that persons older than middle school would take a fancy to his new take on superheroes. But when he started getting letters from college students, he surely played up the "greater respectability" angle for all that it was worth. By the middle 1960s, it's possible to discern him seeking to invest his stories-- usually superheroes, though he'd written many other genres over the years-- with social content that was at least somewhat more sophisticated than that of his competition.

Now, one does not have to be using one's smarts on "stupid stuff" to suss out that Lee was doing something different, and that the "stuff" had a peculiar hold on not just his then-current audience, but upon later comics-audiences as well. But even if one chose to dismiss all of Stan Lee's contributions as trash-- an opinion which a few comics-critics have indeed advanced-- it seems strange that Maher seems utterly unaware of the more ambitious forms of comics that appeared, not during the 1960s, but in the 1980s. During this period, the innovation of the direct market made it feasible to market more ambitious works to adult buyers, be the works some sort of "adult superheroes," like the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN, or "art-comics" along the lines of CEREBUS and LOVE AND ROCKETS.

Now, in one respect Maher is correct. To the extent that Stan Lee made it possible for young comics-buyers of the 1960s to think that the medium was not necessarily meant to be outgrown, then one might indeed say that he was responsible for "dumbing-down" American adults. But patently Maher knows nothing about the comics except for what he sees in the movies-- like IRON MAN 3, in which the somewhat hypocritical comedian has a cameo-- and in this sense, his understanding of the "sea-change" proves inferior even to that of comics-bashers like Frederick Wertham.

Side-note: since the majority of comics-fans tend to skew liberal, I have no idea why it would occur to Maher to blame comics for the ascendance of Donald Trump. But it's likely that he just pulled this nugget from the same place as the rest of his screed: his ass.