REFORM, HARLEQUIN!: WHEN A BODY MEETS A NON-BODY

The moment there is imagination, there is myth. We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 39

The dichotomy Paglia describes between what human beings do to one another in society and what they do within their literary creations has no small application to my own contrast between "thematic escapism" and "thematic realism." To be sure, though Paglia is an insightful commentator on popular art and culture, she applies her statement above not to popular works but to highbrow canonical literature, interpreted though the fairly unique Freudian/Frazerian aesthetics of SEXUAL PERSONAE. Paglia's project in this work is to examine canonical works of literature as imaginative works in terms of their use of sex and violence, rather than in terms of moral prescriptions, the latter mode having been the dominant literary approach from Aristotle to Wayne C. Booth. By eliding many if not all references to the ethical-symbolic world of literature-- what I referred to as "non-body" matters in this essay invoking Octavio Paz-- she throws new light on old classics. I suppose I could fault her for saying too little about "non-body" matters, since for me canonical literature divides itself off from the bulk of popular literature by virtue of the former's strong (though not exclusive) emphasis upon matters of morality and ethics. Still, Paglia admirably shows that literature is more than just a lot of characters standing around having moral debates.

Popular literature is dominantly the literature of thematic escapism, even as canonical literature is dominantly the literature of thematic realism. No matter how "realistic" a given work may seem to be in terms of the type of phenomena described, the content in no way determines the realistic or escapist thrust of the chosen theme, be it explicit or implicit. And if there is indeed an "ethical cleavage" within the canonical literary works Paglia surveys, ranging from Shakespeare to Balzac to Emily Dickinson-- a cleavage that allows such authors to get away with "horrors, rapes and mutilations," all for the greater aesthetic good-- then one might suspect that with works of thematic escapism the cleavage would resemble less the space between two female breasts than the space between the sides of the Grand Canyon.

As it happens, yes and no. Ethical matters, which I termed *themis* in this essay, don't shape the escapist work as they shape the realistic work. Escapist works function at their best as a pure (or nearly pure) invocation of *moira,* which is more or less covalent with what Paglia calls "nature," though I'd advocate a more Jungian than Freudian view of that nature. But given that even the worst popular art has to appeal to human beings who have ethical interests of one kind or another (even if it's just "what's good is what's good for me"), *themis* certainly does retain some relevance, though perhaps more as a leitmotif than a structuring influence.

For example, let's go back to the ethical questions raised regarding the death of the Ryan Choi Atom.

The character's feature incorporated aspects of both *moira* and *themis* in terms of how he was presented to the audience. *Themis* clearly governs the notion of DC presenting for consumption the image of an Asian-American hero, because even in an escapist popular culture images of racial diversification can be deemed good things in themselves, irrespective as to how good other aspects of the character may be. But as a superhero clearly within the agonistic mythos, the main focus of the character's adventures belonged to *moira,* which is the category appropriate to the sensation-oriented aspects of the stories (as well as those aspects in the realm of Jungian intuition, if any-- see GATE OF THE GODS 4 for details).

However, as I argued in the previous essay, a character rooted in sensationalistic adventures was also vulnerable to receiving a sensationalistic demise. The aesthetic execution of Ryan Choi's death sound pretty nugatory, but even bad sensationalistic deaths belong to the aforementioned category of *moira.*

Without my endorsing the execution of the execution itself, the death of Ryan Choi may be take on greater significance over time. Killing a character is a time-honored method (in both popular and canonical literatures) of gauging how much an audience cares about a character. Additionally, given the track record of the Ray Palmer ATOM who will be resuming the role for a time, it's quite possible that Palmer could be eclipsed by a future Choi series.

For now, though, given the failure of the Simone-written series, DC's proper logical course from a business sense is to bring back Ray Palmer, despite his meager track record. I don't regard this as an "ethical cleavage" as certain fans have, however. DC's only ethical requirement was to put Choi out there and see whether or not he sold. When he didn't, he became vulnerable to the mills of the writer-gods, which grind exceedingly painfully most times.

Admittedly Choi's popularity might have been increased over time had he been written into the Justice League. Allegedly Firestorm may have benefitted from League exposure, since his feature didn't start off strong but became more popular over time. However, I'd point out that League association hasn't boosted a lot of other characters into profitable franchises, so that strategy isn't necessarily any more a guarantee of success than the attention-getting ploy of running the character through the mills of death and/or mutilation.

Perhaps the foremost example of such a renascence would be Barbara Gordon, whose "refrigeated" transformation from athletic Batgirl to paraplegic Oracle arguably (in the opinions of many fans besides myself) improved the original character.

Morality does have a justifiable bearing upon even the most escapist stories. However, it's demonstrably not the ruling power for either the producers of said stories or their consumers. Escapism is primarly about coming into contact, with *moira*/nature/myth. Jung and Paglia would concur that myth is sometimes a place of seeming triviality, but also a place where a crappy little shadow (like Guess Who's death) can sometimes grow into a shape of sublime darkness.

REFORM, HARLEQUIN!: THE NEW TITS

I still like my titular pun in Part One on a famous Harlan Ellison story (labored though it may be-- the pun, not the story). But even when I tossed it out there, I was aware that "elitistsnobmen" were not the only ones attempting to get the Harlequin of pop culture to sit straight and eat right.

Basically, there are two types of reformers: those who want a thing to be made better because they care about said thing, and those who are trying to convince you that the object in question is much less interesting/edifying, etc. than something else. The latter are the "elitistsnobmen" in question. The former, then, are the fans, who often have a certain love/hate affair with the object of dispute, but who are not looking to abandon the object for something else.

My general impressions are that most of the fans who objected to the death of Ryan Choi are of the first type. In addition, most would seem to have a liberal belief in the inherent value of ethnic-and-sexual diversity. I would not dispute that this is a real value, even at a time when comic books have become something of a marginal medium in terms of bulk sales. I doubt that diversity will ever pave the road to greater sales for the medium, as some pundits have asserted, but I think that diversity should be pursued in all genres (be it superheroes, teen humor, or whatever) simply because it's the right thing to do.

Yet we're talking about representations of diversity within a mainstream genre currently noted for extreme sensationalism creates some problems as to what an audience can reasonably expect from the producers of sensationalistic entertainment.
It's a little like expecting Roger Corman, who made his fortune putting tits in movies, to suddenly swear off tits.

Jennifer of REAPPROPRIATE responded to my earlier essay thusly:

"In the end, I think much of the reaction is fannish anger, but just because it is anger, doesn't make it misplaced. There should be some acknowledgement on the part of fans that characters are important to them, and that their deaths should be meaningful. Asian Americans are reacting negatively to Ryan Choi's death specifically because he's APIA. We're not saying he should be immune to comic book deaths, we're protesting the seemingly insensitive and inconsequential death that he suffered particularly considering he is one of the only APIA superheroes to have their own title."

I don't disagree with the anger: as per my earlier mention of Gerry Conway (FOUL SLAYER OF BLONDE VIRGIN GWEN STACY!!), I've been angry about a lot of meretricious comic-book deaths in my time, too. I don't have a problem with critiquing a given comic-book death because it's badly handled or disrespectful to earlier iterations of the character. And on the level of purely personal taste, I don't like the trope of the "insenstive and inconsequential death" that is exemplified by Conway's treatment of Gwen Stacy, and I greatly prefer the sort of "tragic but meaningful death" accorded another SPIDEY character, Gwen's pop George, whom Stan Lee killed in a manner no less shocking at the time but with more respect for the character.

And yet, my impression is that "insenstive and inconsequential death" has become the "new tits" for the mainstream superhero genre. I'm sure that tragic deaths still take place in current superhero yarns, but the trope of the meaningless death has in my opinion taken the lead in terms of its power to shock-- and that makes it of supreme interest to producers of sensationalistic entertainment.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the power of this trope as the "Women in Refrigerators" concept. Long before Ron Marz killed off a fairly minor girlfriend-character in GREEN LANTERN #54 (1994), there was a long and perhaps hoary tradition of killing off support-characters in order to put the main hero through the emotional wringer. Certainly superhero comics did not invent the tradition, and on the whole they *may* have been considerably less misogynistic than other genres (the private detective genre comes to mind, with Mickey Spillane at the head of the pack). But had Green Lantern's girlfriend been given a respectful and meaningful death, instead of a cruel sensationalistic death, would anyone have remembered that the character lived or died? Given a respectful death, would she have become a metaphor for female disenfranchisement?

Ryan Choi is now more or less poised to represent Asian superheroes in roughly the same way, even though, as I took pains to stress in my last essay, he's not being victimized to any greater extent than, say, Hawkman and Hawkgirl. In terms of my own taste, I, like Jenn, would rather see him (or any half-decent hero) get a respectful death.

But I don't see much evidence that respectful death sells comics.

And for the producer of genre-comics, as for the carnival barker, his first job is to convince you to plunk down your money. As to whether he's selling you sizzle or steak once you get inside-- that you only find out after paying.

REFORM, HARLEQUIN! SAID THE ELITISTSNOBMAN

The best-known indirect product of both actitives is what we loosely term "recreation," though one will immediately get different theoretical answers as to why humans need, or think they need, such recreation. Between games and literature, however, looms the shadow of didacticism, for while games are difficult to structure (honestly) in order to deliver a message, it can be done with varying degrees of subtlety in literature. This lends to literature the appearance, if not the actuality, of having a "useful purpose" in culture and/or society, and the most "useful" forms of literature are usually those which have or are thought to be works of *thematic realism* insofar as they comment with the same varying degrees of subtlety on man's real-world situation.-- me, EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE.

In this essay I reflected that the current trend at DC and Marvel to kill off heroes in gory or disturbing ways was basically a new permutation of an old trend, which involved comics-authors "compelling quick identification through making travesties of the fictional characters' lives." My main example was a Silver Age Superman story focused on "The Last Days of Superman," in which the Man of Steel succumbs to a mysterious ailment that prompts all his friends and relations into orgies of grief, until the last-minute reprieve that saves his bacon. But I could have chosen any number of other Golden or Silver Age stories that reduce the heroes to travesties of their normal identities.

Just as (according to Bataille) taboos exist in order to be transgressed, heroes exist in order to be travestied. This has nothing to do with anything relating to concepts like "masculine incoherence," for it applies as much to Wonder Woman as Superman. True, the superhero can turn the tables and restore his or her own identity rather than depending on luck or good fairies to do it, but the recent trend toward killing heroes outright-- in sure and certain knowledge that death no longer has dominion within the superhero genre-- is essentially a new form of compelling kinetic identification.

This is why I don't quite understand the fannish furor against the recent death of Asian-Atom Ryan Choi. I only read a couple of the Gail Simone ATOM books and didn't find the title interesting, but it seems that for many fans, the new Atom, whose title failed after 25 issues, became a cause celebre in terms of his being a non-stereotypical Asian hero, as seen in this essay from the blog "Reappopriate."
The blogger "Jenn" admits that she is aware that a lot of comics-characters only die temporary deaths these days, giving the example of the recent return of the Jason Todd Robin, and that therefore "it’s quite possible that Ryan Choi will be back."

Nevertheless, she says: "I tend to agree with the notion that D.C. Comics sets a dangerous precedent for so casually eliminating one of the few prominent Asian American superheroes when he appears no longer necessary."

But how can it be a precedent-- presumably one directed against minority heroes-- if the Ryan Choi Atom is but one Asian amidst a long list of Caucasian heroes who have temporarily died and come back (Superman, Jason Todd, Metamorpho) and is presumably now standing around the halls of Turnaround Purgatory (or whatever Grant Morrison called it), chatting with Hawkman and Hawkgirl as they all wait for some writer to resurrect them.

Some fans have correctly noted that Ryan Choi is being treated no less shittily than any other DC hero, but even this misses a larger point. Such a view puts credence in the notion of a pristine Silver Age ideal in which heroes were good and pure and never suffered humiliation and death.

In fact, humiliation and death were always present in the Silver Age: they were merely camoflagued or worked out in highly symbolic form. I remember that as a young fan I wrote an aggrieved letter to DC Comics, complaining that almost every cover seemed to show Superman "dead, dying or scared to death." The emphasis on humiliation and morbidity evidently disturbed me back then.

It doesn't disturb me now. I recognize the pattern of "death and resurrection" as a valid mythic pattern in current superhero comics, even if I must admit that the Geoff Johnses and their ilk are generally incompetent to get any worthwhile mythicity out of the pattern. But to pursue my game analogy above, the game can be good no matter how bad its players are.

Thus I'm afraid I can't agree with many of the well-intentioned fans who want a Ryan Choi to be immune to this game-pattern because he stands as an example of a non-stereotypical Asian superhero (or even seems to, since Jenn was actually fairly critical of Simone's portrait-of-the-Asian-as-a-superhero). I don't know that DC Comics *isn't* replete with closet racists, but I know that expecting a minority character to be immune to the current patterns of the superhero game, because he seems to validate a didactic standard, is the worst kind of tokenism.

And who knows? Death may actually make people like Ryan Choi better than they did the first time around...

STANDARD BARING PART 2

In SEITZ WARNING I goggled at Matt Zoller Seitz's notion that future superhero films should model themselves after the "spectrum of moods and modes" represented by a certain pop-cultural manifestation:

The ZOMBIE film?

Not the horror genre as a whole? Not even some genre that more closely resembles the superhero flick's emphasis on heroic violence, like the western, but--

The ZOMBIE film? That's what he thinks has "poetry" and "soul?

Though in that essay I didn't pursue parallels between the western and superhero genres, I will do so now in order to talk about how the idea of standards both "high" and "low" can come to alternate within a given culturally-accepted genre.

In this essay I asserted:

Before [Owen] Wister, the subject matter of cowboy adventures was mostly known through dime novels which played to an audience much like that of later pulps and comic books: to juveniles and to (occasionally) adults whose tastes were considerably less than literary. But Wister's novel took that subject matter and raised it to a new level that might have been juvenile in tone but was adult in the concerns it addressed.

In this essay, then, I demonstrated that early "Ned Buntline" westerns were "juvenile pulp" and thus paralleled the content of most early action-adventure comic books, while Owen Wister's VIRGINIAN was aimed more tellingly at an adult audience that desired "adult pulp." The same division according to adult and juvenile appeal can be just as easily observed in the western genre's cinematic history.

I confess I've seen very few of the extant silent westerns, but from online histories it seems demonstrable that a lot of early "oaters," such as those starring Tom Mix, were essentially aimed at an uncritical juvenile audience. In contrast, summations of 1916's HELL'S HINGES seem to evince a headier, more maturely-rigorous view of life than one would find in Tom Mix, even if most of the generic
expectations are still satisfied. HELL'S HINGES even duplicates the basic "gunfighter/schoolmarm" opposition formulated by Wister's VIRGINIAN, itself first transferred to film two years before.

With the coming of sound to the cinema, "adult pulp" westerns seem to have faded from view to a great extent, and the genre seemed dominated for most of the 30's decade by juvenile oaters essayed by Buck Jones, Roy Rogers, and a very young John Wayne. But 1939 seems to have broken the spell and ushered in several major pictures of comparative adult sensibility: Henry King's JESSE JAMES, Michael Curtiz's DODGE CITY, Cecil B. deMille's UNION PACIFIC and both STAGECOACH and DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK (sort of an "Eastern western") from John Ford. All of these I regard as "adult pulp" in contradistinction to more consciously "arty" cinematic works of the time, though not all address the issues of "heroic violence" in quite the same way.

Backtracking a bit, what I find most objectionable in Seitz's careless essay is that in his quest for emotional "moods and modes" he says nothing about how superhero films should achieve this while still satisfying the audience's dominant expectations, one of which is that superhero films will offer them the pleasures of spectacular violence. The history of the western, however, does offer some clues.

First off, saying that all of the 1939 westerns above qualify as "adult pulp" does not mean that they all used identical narrative mythoi. For instance, take DODGE CITY and STAGECOACH.

Curtiz's DODGE CITY is a story of adventure, in which noble sheriff Wade Haddon (Errol Flynn) is challenged to "clean up" Dodge or get the hell out by its ruthless
outlaw boss (Bruce Cabot). There isn't a great deal of time spent expounding on motives or personal conflicts, though in keeping with the film's appeal to an older audience it does present a more well-rounded picture of life than a Roy Rogers film. From what I can gather the film may best be known for sporting one of the best-executed saloon-brawls in cinematic history.

Ford's STAGECOACH falls within the mythos of drama, though some critics may choose to view it as more of a "melodrama." The elements of violence and physical danger

are no less present than in DODGE CITY , as the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) protects an assortment of stagecoach-travelers from marauding Indians. But here, concerns of interpersonal interaction between the travelers take precedence over the action set-pieces.

As a pluralist I don't esteem dramatic adult pulp for being any better than adventurous adult pulp: the two are oriented at doing different things and each does its job quite admirably. I contrast these films to show that it was (and still is) possible for a genre which emphasized heroic violence, and which was once considered dominantly juvenile in tone, to become accepted by an adult audience without sacrificing the pulpier aspects of said genre.

I've already given examples of exemplary superhero-genre films within each of the four Fryean mythoi that have evinced higher standards than Matt Zoller Seitz allows that they have. Perhaps neither WATCHMEN nor SPIDER MAN 2 have won approval with Seitz himself, but I think he would be hard pressed to claim that the two films lack *ANY* of the "standards" he advocates. But the two are as instructive as paradigms for the future of superhero films as the Curtiz and Ford films have been for the history of westerns, and anyone interested in the aforesaid future would be well advised to give them at least as much attention as one gives to ZOMBIE ISLAND MASSACRE.

STANDARD BARING PART 1

At the conclusion of this essay I said:

Maybe in a future essay I'll enlarge on the reasons why I think why superhero films, like their cousins in the pure-fantasy and pure-SF genres, can tap and have often tapped that range--

And why said superdude films have often done much better in that range than Seitz' beloved zombie films.

This essay is a prelude to talking about what range of emotions superhero films have successfully tapped, since I find it incumbent to discuss first some of the potential abuses of "the call for standards" voiced by Seitz, Spurgeon and others too numerous to name.

In George L. Kline's essay "The Use and Abuse of Hegel," the author discusses the many ways that Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx-- though hardly fellow travelers in any other respect-- radically re-interpreted many of the "world-historical" concepts of their philosophical predecessor Georg Hegel. Kline concludes the essay thusly:

"It is in their instrumentalizing and devaluing of the present-- of present communities, cultures, practices, and, especially, persons-- that Nietzsche and Marx most unambiguously exhibit the abusive reversal and inversion of Hegel's doctrine which both of them have undertaken."-- Kline, "Use and Abuse of Hegel," HEGEL AND HIS CRITICS, 1989.

Now Tom Spurgeon is certainly not a philosopher re-interpreting anyone's doctrine, but certainly he's practicing his own breed of "instrumentalizing and devaluing" with the provocative if empty title, "If Superhero Movies Suck, And I Suspect They Do, Why Can't Folks Stop Seeing And Discussing Them?" I refuted his essay in my cited response above, pointing out that his assertion that "Many Superhero Films Also Fail To Meet Most Low Standards" comes down to utter nonsense. I'm sure current superhero films do fail to meet whatever Tom Spurgeon *imagines* to be "low standards" as seen through his eyes, but the datum that most superhero films violate what a Spurgeon *imagines* to be low standards demonstrates nothing about why a real audience of moviegoers bestowed financial success upon a respectable number of these cinematic travesties. The only way Spurgeon's statement could be made to yield sense would be if one posited that the moviegoers who made the first FANTASTIC FOUR film a minor box-office success had not merely "low standards," but "no standards." This conception of the hoi polloi viewing-audience may remind one of the standard Marxist/Adornite portrait of the consumer of "light culture," who is essentially little more than an automaton progammed to buy whatever the Culture Industry grinds out.

I suggest that anyone who still propounds this self-aggrandizing view of popular culture today is incompetent to talk about standards, be they high or low, be they indebted to Nietzsche's faux-aristocratic snobbery or to Marx's liberal obsession with leveling all of culture to a flat economic plane.

Devoted as I am to seeking a middle path between these timeworn extremes, my next essay in this series will explore a possible model that superhero films might seek to emulate to their genuine improvement, as opposed to Seitz' oddball model of "zombie movies" or Spurgeon's lack of any model beyond his laundry list of personal complaints.

THE POOREST JOHNNY ONE-NOTE

Back in this essay I wrote of Freud and Levi-Strauss:"the two scholars are alike in their attempt to fit humankind into a monocausal straitjacket, based on a Johnny-One-Note conception of empirical evaluation."

And I stand by that, but I must admit that even if the two of them were Johnny One-Notes, they both sang their one note on key, resulting in some worthy applications of their theories to literary criticism.

The poorest Johnny One-Note, though, has to be the guy who "sang only one note" but couldn't even stay on key: none other than Kapital-Hatin' Karl Marx, whose ideology has propounded more subintellectual drivel in literary studies than any other one-note-singer can claim. Comics-criticism, still in its infancy, is still particularly vulnerable to this game of "Spot the Evil Colonial Influence," as is clear from the dominant tropes of elitist criticism by Gary Groth and his Merry Bund.

However, every once in a while, one gets a glimmer of hope in darkness. I quoted one such elitist in INCEST WE TRUST PART 2, my sometime-opponent Noah Berlatsky, as an example of "overinterpretation," though not specifically of a Marxist bent. However, in a more recent blogpost, Berlatsky wrote the following:

"A lot of pulp narratives, from Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu, draw much of their spark from colonial fever dreams, and that’s certainly the case for Tintin as well...
This, then, is really a case where I don’t like the sequence despite its racism and imperialism. As far as I can tell, I like it because of them. The fascination/repulsion Herge feels towards the strange gods of colonized cultures generates real creative frisson. Which makes me wonder if maybe that’s true of racism and stereotypes in general. It seems like, beyond their other uses, they sometimes have an appeal which might be called aesthetic. A certain amount of cultural creativity goes into shaping the person in front of you into a phantom monstrosity, and that creativity can itself be exciting and fascinating. The dream’s appeal is its vividly imagined ugliness; the exhilaration of imposing on the world the gothic products of one’s skull."

The twaddle about "colonial fever dreams" is the usual Marxist cant, which fails to perceive the universality of cultural chauvinism beyond the boundaries of Marx's dialectic. But the perception that there is "cultural creativity" in such acts of chauvinistic projection has the pure sound of Sigmund Freud's single good note, even down to the "fascination/repulsion" ambivalence.

Of course, though Sigmund kicks Karl M.'s ass, the former is just as well-and-truly kicked by another Carl: Freud's sometime follower Jung. In another essay I'll talk about why Jung's phenomenology of evil has much wider relevance to cultures popular and otherwise than even Freud's best insight(s). But for now I'll finish by saying:

Attaboy, Noah.

OFF BEAT, PART II

Going back to two of Heidi's quotes already cited in Part 1:

Is this [sheer fantasy] REALLY one of the things that Superhero comics do best…or one of the things that COMICS do best? I think if you were plopped down in a room full of Krazy Kat, Thimble Theater, Milt Gross, Jim Woodring, Walt Kelly, Gilbert Hernandez, Carl Barks, Chester Gould, James Kochalka, Cathy Malkasian, Kozue Amano, Dash Shaw, Renee French, Hergé, Moebius, Akira Toriyama, Jeff Smith, Jason, Kazuo Umezu, Charles Burns and Tom Neely, for instance, you might think that comics just did fantastic world building in GENERAL best of all.

Gene, is there really any question but that superheroes are an adolescent power fantasy (not necessarily just a male one) and nearly every modern interpretation of the development of Superman suggests as much.

In the spirit of making the last be first, I'll start by saying that even if all existing iterations of SUPERMAN could be fairly judged as adolescent power fantasies, I don't see why that would ipso facto prove that the superhero genre was intrinsically and irredeemably adolescent in nature. It's true that there are a great many people who believe this, but even a statistically dominant belief does not make a given proposition a fact (though said belief certainly conditions the way society receives a given genre).

I assume that Heidi says "nearly every" interpretation because she's aware of a few super-iterations that have pushed the proverbial envelope: Alan Moore's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomrrow?", Morrison's ALL-STAR SUPERMAN and the Brian Azzarello-Jim Lee collaboration. But why should one put any of these aside? The basic design and mythic reputation of the Superman character may well always have some appeal in juvenile quarters for however long the character remains a going concern. But some superheroes have been known to largely reject their ties to juvenile audiences and wholly enter the realm of Adult Pulp, which was the case with the DAREDEVIL title for several years (though I confess I haven't looked at it in the last year or so).

I'm aware of the school of thought that says that superheroes are juvenile material whether they're blissfully innocent or they include quasi-adult material like Dirk Deppery's perceived "fuck dolls." I reject this view because it's superficially reasoned and emphasizes social reception over literary analysis. This is pretty much the same reason I reject Will Eisner's reading of superheroes as a form of negative compensation, though I should point out (as I did in ADLER PATED) that Adler also recognized forms of "positive compensation," in which one finds new pathways of growth in response to negative given situations.

This brings me to the earlier Heidi quote, in which she takes issue with Mark-Oliver Frisch's privileging of the superhero genre's ability to take flight from the dreary domain of consensual reality. Heidi lists a lot of artists who don't do superheroes as her counterexamples, though I'd have to say that at least one work by Akira Toriyama, DRAGON BALL, is pretty thoroughly implicated in the superhero idiom.

As for the others... well...

A lot of them are INVENTIVE--

But not that IMAGINATIVE, in the sense of departing from consensual restraints in the way Frisch indicated. I responded to Frisch by saying that the superhero genre didn't have a lock on this quality, but I don't think Heidi was thinking in these terms when she assembled her list (though I'm not familiar with a handful of the names on her list).

For instance, I've not seen examples of what Heidi calls "world building" in
Charles Burns, Jim Woodring, Walt Kelly, or Chester Gould. Basically, all of them are just giving us our consensual world filtered through some fantasy-trope, whether it's through the use of funny animals as in POGO and FRANK or through a fever-dream version of the real world a la BLACK HOLE and DICK TRACY. Of the four I think Chester Gould is the most imaginative in terms of one particular trope, that of dreaming up a splendid catalogue of nasty TRACY adversaries. But I don't think that constitutes building a world. I've read one or two of the FRANK collections and was impressed with his command of surrealistic effects, but again-- what "world?"

Jeff Smith's BONE does build a world, all right, and it's reasonably well executed, though I can't say it resonated with me as deeply as Narnia or Middle-Earth, or even The Land. Segar and Herriman take an approach to fantasy structurally close to the approaches of Woodring and Kelly, but the strength of the former two is less additive than subtractive: they tend to paint minimalist portraits of slightly wonky worlds that don't get as flat-out surrealistic as Burns and Woodring do. Lastly, Barks, Gilbert Hernandez and Herge all paint on bigger canvasses, and thus I could see all three of them as closer in spirit to the extravagance of the superheroes as formulated in the best works of Siegel, Finger, Fox, Kirby, et al.

And of course Tezuka and Takahashi, each of whom seems to have had just one major work in the superhero idiom (ASTRO BOY and INU YASHA, respectively), ought to make anyone's shortlist for the Most Extravagantly Imaginative Comics-People of All Time. Certainly they're on mine.