OCD ON A HOTPLATE

Returning to the question of Superman's status as myth--

I've said *here* that my criteria for the presence of mythicity in a literary/subliterary work depends on how it communicates Campbell's "four functions" of archaic myth: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the psychological, and the sociological. IMO the first two have no relevance within the sphere of the Siegel/Schuster stories I've finished in SUPERMAN CHRONICLES. I anticipate having more to say about the functions of psychological and sociological myths in the early stories in a future essay. But first I want to go into my criteria for evaluation a little more deeply.


It should be a given that no one cares what any given critic thinks, on a purely personal level, about a given literary object. If as a statement of personal taste I say that I like the Superman of the 1960s more than the Superman of the 1940s, then I'm the only one to whom that fact can conceivably matter. Others only may care about a critic's opinions/observations to the extent that they become (to borrow a Jungian word) "transpersonal."

To take a specific example, look at Gary Groth's summing-up for the life of Will Eisner after the artist's death. Groth includes assorted details on his personal reception with the work of Eisner-- not encountering it at a young age, for instance-- before giving a general history of the artist's career and then pronouncing that Eisner's "seminal creation," THE SPIRIT, deserved Groth's "measured appreciation" due to the "frivolousness that gave The Spirit its charm." I don't agree with this Grothian estimation or various others in the essay, but Groth's opinion has significance for me only on that transpersonal level where I ask, "Was humor the most important aspect of Eisner's SPIRIT?"

Now, though few elitists would begrudge Groth this "measured appreciation," given his almost single-handed founding of the elitist pattern of comics-criticism, hardly anyone else who mounts a defense of a despised "popular" work receives the same consideration. The usual refrain goes something like, "You're only making up reasons to justify liking the trash for which you have personal/childish/nostaglic reasons for liking." This lame accusation takes on new levels of stupidity whenever it is addressed to a critic who has parsed his personal reflections no less than Groth, along the lines of "I liked Work X as a kid but it clearly doesn't have the deeper resonance of Work Y, even though I liked Y as a kid as well." The world of the elitists is always governed by that Carrolesque law, "Sentence first, evidence afterwards."

Now, when I reread the early 40s tales from SUPERMAN CHRONICLES, clearly I can't read them exactly as did the kid-audience of the period. Of course, one also can't read fiction of any kind from any era but one's own and be well-attuned to the way one's own culture received the works in question. Again, one has to use one's intuition for the transpersonal factors that unite readers and audiences across barriers of time and culture. And it's such an intuition that makes me feel like the Siegel-and-Schuster original version of their character comes very close to being a null-myth.

I'm certainly not the only one to comment on unusual tropes in the Superman mythos. In a preface to the reprint-volume SUPERMAN OF THE FORTIES, Bob Hughes notes certain ways in which that mythos differed from that of similar characters before and after the Man of Tomorrow's advent:

"To start off, [Superman] wasn't a crimefighter. Superman, from the start, was a Personality. The original "Champion of the Oppressed" was a wise cracking, whirling dervish of energy, popping out of the sky to right a wrong..."

I'm sure Hughes was aware that the character did fight a lot of crime; what he probably meant was that Superman was not defined by crimefighting, as one might argue that a predecessor like the Shadow was. Alvin Schwartz's notion of Superman as a "guardian angel" may be helpful here, but if so it's a very populist version of a guardian angel, one who didn't mind breaking the law in order to achieve justice. Early Superman also showed more than a touch of the trickster in those stories where his creators chose to have him use his powers to hoodwink evildoers rather than simply beating them up.

A number of contemporary comics-fans have found this populist vision of a Superman more appealing than later versions, including one scholar, Bradford Wright, who expounds on his readings of comics as sociological myths in his book COMIC-BOOK NATION. I won't detail my specific oppositions to this reading of the 40s Superman (except to remind attentive readers of my objection to purely-sociological readings, seen here, but I will point out that if I were as incapable of measured readings as some of my opponents have been pleased to claim, my argument against the superiority of the 40s Superman's mythicity would probably begin and end with "I just didn't like it."

It's certainly possible to bring forth a high degree of symbolic complexity in a populist vision of wrong-righting, even one lacking any metaphenomenal aspects whatsoever. Many of the films of Frank Capra, both before and after WWII, evince a populist vision much like that of the Siegel-and-Schuster SUPERMAN: a vision whose protagonists combine a secular toughness with a sacred Good-Samaritan ethic. Two years before Superman debuted in funny books, Capra and his collaborators put forth a major populist film-myth in 1936's MISTER DEEDS GOES TO TOWN.

However, while MISTER DEEDS, despite existing in a "realistic" world, evokes a number of American mythic oppositions-- small town/big city, selfishness/prodigality, conventional sanity/wisdom-- the 40s Superman manages to touch on none of these sort of topics. Some might claim that this is only because Superman was written for kids, but the Kane/Finger Batman was also written for kids, and though the 40s Batman isn't as pure an emblem of populist sentiment as either Superman or DEEDS, one can certainly observe strong populist currents in many Bat-tales.

So SUPERMAN wasn't automatically bad because it was (as Gary Groth has often said) because it was written for children and sub-literate morons. But it doesn't satisfy my litmus test for symbolic complexity, even though there are some powerful symbolic subtexts, that I've already detailed in Christ with Muscles. Why not?

I would certainly put some blame on the artwork of Joe Schuster. Although Gerald Jones ably defended some of the aspects of the feature's artwork (both by Schuster and other hands), most SUPERMAN art is pretty workmanlike. Yet as I've also mentioned before, I sometimes find charming the simplicity of other Golden Age heroes to whom I was not exposed in youth. (I once remarked to Harvey Kurtzman that I'd discovered a passion for Quality Comics; from his expression I'd say he instantly consigned me to the pits of subliteracy.)

But the main blame IMO has to be the scripts by Jerry Siegel, for they do jump around-- and here's the relevance of this essay's title at long last-- like an OCD grade-schooler on a hotplate. In MOT Gerald Jones remarked on the "impatience" in Siegel's script for the original prose "Superman" tale, but Siegel's hopping-around isn't just impatience; it often seems like a genuine attention-deficit. One might not expect Aristotelian unities in a comic book story (although I could again argue that a lot of BATMAN tales did deliver same), but even considering the herky-jerky plotting one could find in many of the pulps and comic strips that inspired SUPERMAN, Siegel's scripts seem to wander without knowing what effect they're shooting for-- which I'd argue is the reason that his grand populist pronoucements often seem to have less foundation than the average simple melodrama.

Nor was it just that Siegel wasn't able to buttress concepts of realistic life (even though, as I observed in "Christ," his perserverance in a mostly-mundane world had a lot to do with his mirroring of Judeo-Christian attitudes). Siegel also didn't bring a lot of conviction to stories based around metaphenomenal concepts, which, in early SUPERMAN tales, usually stemmed from a mad scientist or some sort. The hero's first encounter with a villain able to invent weapons formidable enough to hurt the hero takes place in ACTION #14, but the evil Ultra-Humanite only shows up in the last four pages of a story that starts out concerned with faulty building materials in a subway. Contrast to the BATMAN tales of Finger and Fox. When the tales were about gangsters, they started and ended with gangsters. When the tales were about vampires, they started and ended with vampires. There were a few Golden Age creators who could leap about in an incoherent manner and still be entertaining-- Fletcher Hanks, for one-- but despite the innovation of Superman, Siegel's stories seem awfully unimaginative, and therefore bereft of the symbolism I'm looking for.

Interestingly, of all the Siegel stories I've read, the ones with the greatest mythicity are the ones he did for the 1960s SUPERMAN titles under legendary tough-editor Mort Weisinger. A story like "Superman's Return to Krypton" shows a far greater organization of story elements-- including symbolism-- than anything Siegel had done in earlier eras. Yet it doesn't seem that this was Siegel's normal mode of operation, for after he severed relations with DC in the mid-60s, his scripts became pretty wild-and-woolly once more, as one can observe from his output at the Archie imprint Mighty Comics.

In the final analysis, I think that some of the more covert themes of the 40s Superman do show enough mythicity to keep the corpus of tales out of the null-mythic dustbin, but I do have to admit that uncovering those covert themes is indeed, to pursue another (I think) Aristotelian paradigm, like digging diamonds from trash.

But as I hope to display when I get back to the theme of "the sex-war in Superman," even a diamond taken from trash is still a diamond.

MY OTHER FAVORITE QUOTE FOR '08

The following quote comes from this post on the blog I'M SKEERDY, in response to a minor shitstorm last October from a small contingent of comics-critics that decried a particular comic book, NIGHTWING #146 as "torture porn." I don't care about the title any more than the blogger I'm quoting did, but I agree with the spirit of his response:

'if you picked up Nightwing #146 expecting something more profound than "Nightwing beats the bad guy" or "Nightwing fails to beat the bad guy", if you weren't prepared for "torture porn", I contend that you are quite probably a fool.'

I may not agree with everything the poster says in the essay, but I think I've also observed many times where critics become blind to the reality that junky comics are supposed to deliver junky thrills. I will admit that there's a sort of "middle ground" of popular works that deliver their thrills with a patina of sophistication, but I for one wouldn't expect every Scott Lobdell to be transformed into Alan Moore; nor would I think such a transformation would necessarily be an improvement.

NIGHTWING !46 might be good junk, or it might be bad (i.e., undistinguished) junk. But it should be judged for what it's supposed to be, and not according to some critic's preconceived notions.

CHRIST WITH MUSCLES

Writing this on Xmas Eve, it occurs to me-- not the first time-- that for all the limitations of the actual Superman stories (more on which another time), Superman's creators did succeed in imparting to their hero a quasi-religious quality to his role of "secular savior."

Obviously many characters, both in the adventure-genre and elsewhere, had borrowed aspects of Judeo-Christian mythology, whether they were Miltonic rebels or suffering servants. The Lone Ranger, for instance, sports an origin drawn from the archetypal motif of the "slaughter of the innocents," and the Ranger's mission to serve in taming the West was the logical archetypal consequence of his specialness for having survived the carnage. In this dedication to an unending cause of universal justice, Superman is not very different from many of the heroes who preceded him.

What seems to have made the difference, however, was the character's possession of literal super-powers, which prior to Siegel and Schuster had rarely been exploited outside either (1) SF works that did not take place on contemporary Earth, like the Burroughs "Mars" books, or (2) either comic or horrific uses of super-powers, as with H.G. Wells's THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES and THE INVISIBLE MAN.

Moreover, the character's supernal nature was justified through an overtly Christian motif in the Superman origin, even if the motif is played as straight sci-fi drama for the space of one panel in ACTION #1-- a single boy-child being sent from "heaven" to Earth by his father. This is not by any means the only myth-motif suggested by either this short origin or later elaborations, but it is certainly the one that may have caused many readers to associate the "Man of Tomorrow" with the "Lamb of God," though such a blasphemous association had to pretty much remain at the subconscious level.

For instance, though I'm going on memory here, 40s SUPERMAN scripter Alvin Scwartz once said that he didn't consider Superman to be an ordinary superhero, but that he was more comparable to the "guardian angels" of Judeo-Christian myth. Now, this statement-- assuming I've remembered it more or less accurately-- is easily contradicted when one looks at the careers of other superheroes of the Golden Age, for most of them did, at one time or another, act as guardian angels to ordinary folks. As the superheroes were dominantly about physically battling danger, most of the help rendered concerned battles on behalf of the defenseless, just as it had with pulp-magazine heroes like Doc Savage. Had Superman never existed, comic books probably still would featured their share of adventure-heroes succoring the weak, and maybe some of them would even have ventured into more melodramatic territory, as Batman did in one early 40s story where he causes an entire city to care for the suffering of one woman (a story whose title I'll look up later, and one probably liberally swiped from Capra's 1933 LADY FOR A DAY).

But even though many of the other costumed characters were no less dedicated than Superman to helping the underdogs, Schwartz's instinct about the "guardian angel" does seem to me to fit Superman better than it does any other hero. It's certainly possible that in thinking so I'm merely influenced by many later accretions to the mythos (like DC's restatement of the Golden Rule: "Do good and you too can be a Superman"-- though I don't remember hearing that phrase when I was growing up).

I think the real reason many fans (and some creators) of the character may see him as a secular Christ-figure is that, unlike many of the exotically-powered superhumans that followed him (Green Lantern, the Flash, and even the Spectre, who had the literal "Power of God"), Superman always seemed like an ordinary fellow despite his having been born with "power from above." That touch of the mundane was also a pronounced aspect of both Judaism and Christianity, and marks one of the dialectical elements that most separates them (as well as that later "Religion of the Book," Islam) from earlier myth-systems, where arguably the mundane is subsumed by the mythic.

Of course, Superman/Christ is not a perfect fit, if for no other reason than that Superman's adventures are a lot less about "turning the other cheek." Nevertheless, the dominant image one gets with Superman is that of a god striding among mortals, a god almost constantly forbearing to strike with full force even against the evil.

I say "almost" because at times even the creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster yielded to the temptation to let their hero be as wildly violent as the Greek Heracles. In ACTION COMICS #25 (1940), the hero is rushed by two men-- one of whom, admittedly, has the power to freeze the Man of Tomorrow via hypnotism-- and Superman throws a plane at them.

Yes, that's right. THROWS A ****ING PLANE AT THEM! (You don't see the bodies get mangled by the impact but the villains aren't mentioned as having survived, either.)

Still, occasional lapses to the contrary, the image of Christ-like forbearance came across with Superman as it did with no other superhero. And that is why he remains a "Christ with muscles"-- as well as "with girlfriends," though admittedly it did apparently take him over forty years to enjoy carnal relations with any of them.

And that will lead (eventually) to the second most important myth-aspect of the SuperMythos: the Super War-of-the-Sexes.

IT'S A BIRD, IT'S A PLANE-- IT'S A NULL-MYTH?

I've just finished reading the first five issues of SUPERMAN CHRONICLES, which archive reprints all of the Superman stories in chronological order of publication.

As I commented in my "100 best serial comics" post, I'm ambivalent on the early Siegel-Schuster Superman tales. There are flashes of brilliance in the early stories, but even allowing for the fact that these stories weren't meant to be read more than a few per month, I have to admit that these stories don't come off as nearly as inventive as the earliest Batman or Wonder Woman tales, or even a lot of the second-raters, like Doctor Fate and Starman.

Many years ago in a review of one of the SUPERMAN movies for COMICS JOURNAL, animated cartoon-expert Mike Barrier described Superman as a "failed myth." I don't remember what terms he used to demonstrate that conclusion, and I suspect that I'd probably disagree with them. But I would agree that, no matter how "mythic" a given character may be *in potentia,* it's always possible for the execution to "fail" so as to produce what Ursula LeGuin called a "false myth," and what I call a "null-myth."

There's no question in my mind that the later SUPERMAN with which I grew up, the SUPERMAN of the 1960s, is a successful myth. In future posts I'll be addressing how well the original succeeds or fails from a myth-critical point of view.

BATTLE OF THE BIOLOGIES

"Valerie has been following the current New Avengers storyline in which Tigra is repeatedly brutalized and humiliated. Writer Brian Bendis hints that it’s just so she can make a triumphant comeback against her oppressor. That’s certainly a valid storyline taken on its own merits. The question is how much the artwork resembles Superheroines Demise. Because if it looks like that, there may be some kind of ulterior motive....So next time you claim your interest in superheroes is completely innocent and devoid of fetishistic aspects, well…you’re going to have to PROVE it!"--Heidi McDonald, 'The One with a Lot of Comments," 1-31-08.

"Naturally, this formula [of men beating women] is not popular with girls. Granting all the masochistic excitement of terror, it is difficult to identify yourself with a corpse. And so there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

Let's do the usual compare-and-contrast between these two statements on comic-book sadism:

(1) They were written by different people in different eras and for very different audiences. Also, the writer of the first comment is a woman; the writer of the second was a man (now deceased).

(2) The first quote is from a short blogpost on a comics news-blog that by virtue of brevity alone probably does not represent every aspect of the author's thoughts about the subject of sadism in entertainment, while LOVE AND DEATH was a book of essays specifically devoted to its author's ruminations on the subject.

(3) Both assertions are dominantly serious in tone though the end of McDonald's becomes somewhat flippant, perhaps because she knows that one cannot prove a negative, as in, "There's no fetishism of any kind in my superhero-readings," etc.

(4) Neither assertion is backed up by any great quantity of specific textual examples. McDonald cites two storylines and a cover to "prove" that female brutalization is rampant in mainstream comics, but then, she may not be all that serious about making the point, and of course it is just a short blogpost. Legman devotes one essay in his book to comic-book sadism, but doesn't provide very many more specific examples than McDonald does, though for the above citation about "ravishingly pretty girls" beating the hell out of male victims Legman does reference an old Timely-Atlas comic, JEANIE #16.

(5) Legman was imo a full-blown crank; McDonald is imo merely cranky.

(6) Finally, though most of Legman's tirade is directed against adventure-comics, and thus against boys' entertainment, he does assert that girl readers of his time were also capable of being warped by sadistic entertainments, not all of them within the adventure-genre. In contrast, McDonald's post speaks only of male-over-female sadism (in the Superheroines Demise website and her three specific references) and of male-over-male sadism (in a reference to a fellow involved in superhero-oriented "rough trade" of the "boys only" variety).

So, since McDonald asks the average superhero-reader for "proof" of his "innocence," should I now ask her for "proof" that she did not intentionally privilege male fantasy-sadism as being a thing unique, without parallel in the female of the species?

Admittedly, though Legman clearly believes women were capable of sadism, he merely "proved" it with overblown rhetoric. His fellow traveler Wertham was no better, excoriating Wonder Woman for providing an unfeminine ideal for young girls, and citing his typical undocumented anecdotal evidence to prove that girls as much as boys could become fascinated with comic-book violence.

Testimonials from female readers of superhero comics don't generally seem to provide much evidence for the existence of female sadism. Trina Robbins is one of the few underground creators to cite an early love for superheroines, to whom she devoted a book, THE GREAT WOMEN SUPERHEROES, but if any of them tickled her in that way she didn't write of it (though she did emphasize how one heroine, name of Lady Fairplay, defeated a bad guy with a huge POW-ing punchout). Gloria Steinem, in her introduction to the 1972 Holt reprint of several WONDER WOMAN strips, reflects on her early love of Wonder Woman in terms of the heroine's accomplishments, though one wonders if there isn't a whiff of pleasure in seeing villains of the male sex brought low when Steinem expresses satisfaction in the "sweet vengeance" of seeing a female heroine in action. (Of course Wonder Woman fought female villains too, but what aspect of their defeat would connote "vengeance?")

Camille Paglia was one noted if controversial author who openly believed that the biology of men predisposed them toward sadism, while the biology of women had the opposite effect. I disagree, for I believe that though both biological and cultural conditioning keeps the genders from having the exact same orientation toward any aspect of life (such as power-relations), those factors don't inhibit in either sex fundamental human desires, such as the desire to see evil defeated and justice done via fantasized proxies.

If this were not a real possibility, I would think it impossible that any women could ever be fans of any sort of adventure-genre in any medium, not just the genre of superheroes in the medium of comic books. I would think that at the very least McDonald might grant that women could be as given to what I define as "casual sadism" as men are. Perhaps she might argue that men are more dominantly drawn toward the extremes of syndromic sadism, as Paglia believed, and of course this is a question that will never be "proven."

However, even if one wished to grant that men are more prone to fantasy-sadism of differing types than women are, one still must get past the formidable barrier of logic that shows a character like Wonder Woman succeeding in the comics-market long before feminism proper made its cultural debut. True, some critics have argued that much of the feature's appeal was rooted in seeing beautiful women bound, either by men or by other women, but if this was the feature's sole appeal, then WONDER WOMAN would have looked much more like the more titillating breeds of jungle-girl comics of the time.

Instead, WONDER WOMAN was a full-fledged superhero comic of the time, which meant lots of fighting-- and if a comic contains fights and remains popular, then it seems obvious that the fights are one element pleasing readers (thus leading to "sthenosadism" of both the syndromic and non-syndromic varieties). Certainly WONDER WOMAN's creator argued that part of the feature's appeal for male readers was in seeing her dominate men with her superior power, probably as much with her muscles as with her magic lasso. Marston's statement ignores that his heroine also dominated a lot of women both ways as well, but though Gerald Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW implies that this chickfight-aspect was the feature's real main appeal for the male fans, I think Jones was incorrect on the same grounds I stated above with regard to the "bondage of women" theme. Marston's WONDER WOMAN was a polyvalent pulp masterwork which, unlike any other comic of its time, regularly depicted all four of the possible permutations of gendered fantasy-sadism, which are, for anyone who forgot:

Male-over-male// male-over-female// female-over-female//female-over-male

Regarding contemporary comics that are not quite as broadly contoured as the Marston WONDER WOMAN, I do sympathize somewhat with Heidi McDonald's ire against casual depictions of the male-over-female species of sadism. Of all the four, it is the configuration that one could most consider, to borrow from Levi-Strauss, "bad to think." And yet, unlike McDonald I don't think that the configutation's presence "proves" anything about the propensities of modern superhero-comics readers. For many such readers, the possibility of a heroine being thrashed may signify nothing more than the risks of the game, with no syndromic interest. And if such readers also read features where women regularly beat the crap out of male opponents, maybe they should really worry about "proving" that they're not of the Marston persuasion, rather than that of "Superheroines Demise."

STHENOSADISM

In THEORY OF SADISM I wrote:

'one can schematize the respective attitudes [of sadists and masochists] so: the pure sadist wants to actively inflict his power/strength upon others without opposition; the pure masochist wants to have the power/strength of others inflicted upon him, albeit under controlled conditions. I prefer the term "strength" to the now-dated term "phallic power" employed by Freud and Deleuze, since the former term does not limit itself to the phallically-endowed gender.'

Thus I linked the human tendency to admire strength and/or power that characterizes sthenolagnia to the general concept of sadism. Under this general concept I subsume both syndromic and non-syndromic ("casual") sadism, for from an outsider's perspective it is almost impossible to separate one type of dynamization from the other: to separate the roar of the Roman colosseum's crowd as they watch a real victim eaten by a lion from the roar of a moviegoing crowd as they see a fantasy-villain blown into a thousand pieces. That they are logically separable, though, I believe I've demonstrated.

Though sthenolagnia proper can arise from the demonstration of strength in a non-aggressive context, I define sthenosadism as an affect (whether temporary or lasting) that focuses only upon strength used in an aggressive context. If nothing else such a liminal concept might avoid the logical problems of the Legman-Wertham formulations, in which the reader of any violent entertainment is conceived to be such a vulnerable vessel that exposure to any kind of violence has the power to warp him beyond the pale of normality. The model of sthenosadism at least puts forth a continuum in which most of these readers of said violent entertainment simply shrug off their effects as "only a movie/comic book/etc." while only a few internalize the violence into their own psyches.

Sthenosadism also works better than the Freud and Deleuze formulations re: sadism and masochism, in that both authors tended to characterize "power" as essentially "phallic." By making this distinction, both authors overdetermined the content of sadistic fantasy as a product of one real-world differentiation. That differentiation-- that boys are almost always stronger than girls-- supposedly means that "power" is unilaterally conceived in terms of "the phallus." Yet to a child in the so-called "pre-Oedipal" phase, both of his parents are irresistably stronger than he/ she is, and both for the same reason: because they are as giants beside the stature of the child. I'm sure few children are slow to realize that the mother is usually the giant of lesser stature, but in contrast to Freud I see no reason why that would make a child of either sex conceive power in terms of maleness. Philip Slater's book on Greek mythology/psychology has some pointed remarks on the shortcomings of Freud's male-centered system, and how considerably it overlooks the imposing nature of the mother. Deleuze sometimes seems to verge on making some similar point, but in the end he too falls victim to Freud's phallocentric preoccupations.

Unlike the Freud-Deleuze conceptions of sadism and masochism, then, the conception of sthenosadism would cover all possible permutations of power-fantasy, be they:

Male-over-female
Male-over-male
Female-over-female
Female-over-male

In addition, this schema would applicable whether or not the budding young sthenosadist were casual or obsessive, or even male or female. In my next essay (the one that was *supposed* to follow up on the Heidi McDonald remarks), I hope to bring this all to a rousing conclusion.

SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND

One disadvantage of going the historical route in refuting the charges of syndromic sadism made by Wertham and Legman is that both authors are dead and cannot respond to my refutations. There are modern critics who object to violent entertainment on aesthetic grounds, and occasionally one of them will toss out the "sadism" accusation as a passing brickbat, sometimes even with a light-hearted manner (see below). I'm not aware of any who have attempted to make the accusation via a psychological schema, such as the one used by Legman and Wertham, though.

Thus I have to anticipate how these two deceased intellectuals might have found fault with my assertion that the paradigm of the adventure-genre (hero fights villain with both having the ability to defend themselves) does not match the paradigm of classical sadism (victimizer tortures victim, who has no ability to defend him/herself). Based on their writings, I think I can assume that both of them would use some variant of an "inconstant reader" argument. Assuming that both of them granted the difference in paradigms, they would leap to say that even though the hero of a given superhero comic generally faces the villain mano-a-mano (or even womano-a-womano, etc.), the budding young proto-sadist ignores the ethical ideals put forth in the text (much as they thought he did with the phony "you can't beat the law" preachments in the crime comics). From there (they might say) the budding young proto-sadist would go on to become obsessed with characters beating other characters without the benefit of self-defense, and of course, violent comics would be to blame for this development.

While I would not agree with the "blame" part of this imagined argument, I would certainly agree that any individual who did so transform the dominant "hero vs. villain" battles into one-sided beatings for his/her personal fantasies would indeed be a syndromic sadist. (For convenience here I will use "sadist" after Freud's somewhat-indiscriminate formulation; that is, including the phenomenon of "masochism" within the "sadism" rubric.) That such individuals do exist is testifies by a number of sites on the Internet, one of which is touched on by BEAT reporter Heidi McDonald in this post from 1/31/08, "The One With a Lot of Comments."

Now, McDonald does not call for a ban (direct or indirect) of violent comics as did Wertham and Legman. However, she does stray somewhat into their territory when she lumps together syndromic sadism with what might called "casual sadism."

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind. I take the position of Plato's PHILEBUS, which asserted that the "soul" could experience many affects in the course of its "owner's" life, and that some would have transitory effects while others would permanently "make their mark," so to speak. In my opinion, most audiences who temporarily take pleasure in seeing hero beat villain are experiencing a transitory effect that does not noticeably warp their lives. If the effect were more than transitory on a wide scale, one might expected by now to see civilization reduced to the fascist state that both of the anti-comics critics feared.

It's unclear to me as to whether McDonald really believes that most superhero readers are potential syndromic sadists, as her comment toward the end of the post is made with a somewhat flippant tone. However, it would be a mistake, due to that slight humorous tone, to believe that she doesn't hold strong views on the subject of women being beaten. even within the bounds of fiction. In part I'll be examining some of the philosophical aspects of McDonald's expressed views in my next post.