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If you even glance at this blog, you’ll get a pretty firm idea that I like comic books. I have since I was eight years old, and I’m unlikely to stop anytime soon. I like comics that a lot of people on the blogosphere would shame me for liking, and I’m OK with that. I think comics are a wonderful piece of Western culture and that superheroes in particular are necessary. Every hero is a type or archetype, each represents some basic element of humanity in a particular way, and so I think it’s worth considering their deaths, and what they say about those characters.
Spider-Man: Peter Parker hates being Spider-Man. He’s given up the webs time and time again, thrown the costume away, visited scientists to remove his powers, only to return to the superhero life later. His sense of responsiblity, what I call his bitter obligation, is too strong; Uncle Ben hovers over him, a spectre of all the possibilities, the things he could do, the people he could save. But after fifteen years of fighting, eventually it’s all going to fall apart. Spider-Man will toss it behind him like a filthy rag, and only occasionally look back. He’ll have a kid and worry about her instead of worrying about everyone in the city, and he’ll die happy of cardiac failure in his mid-seventies, comfortably asleep.
Superman: Superman is a Christ-figure; he came from above, with amazine abilities, to save us all. His greatest power is his moral sense, his sense of self-sacrifice, his constant confidence in the right thing to do. While that power has faltered at times, its his great strength and his inevitable doom. He will die preventing Brainiac from blowing up the sun, or stopping a kryptonite asterioid from smashing into his adopted planet. He will die that we may live. (alternately, Superman may never die; some interpretations have him living into his billions)
Batman: How long can he really last? Although, like Spider-Man, his heroics are a struggle to live up to an ideal he imposed upon himself, his war is one of vengeance, generalizing Joe Chill, the man who killed his parents, into every criminal in Gotham. He’s strong, and he’s smart, but his is not a life of poetry and self-sacrifice — he’s a soldier of revenge, and he will not stop, because he cannot stop. He revels in his war. He is, at his core, Batman, not Bruce Wayne. But he will stretch himself too thin, and his death won’t be at the hands of the Joker or the Penguin. No, the Batman’s luck will run out, and he’ll be taken down by some two-bit punk with a stolen pistol.
Captain America: Shot outside a courthouse. He died for his political ideals, refusing to bow to a government out of control, the loyal opposition.
Iron Man: Tony Stark, already dependent on his machines to survive, will only grow increasingly so. As he grows older, he will become terrified of his mortality, and begin constructing further devices to extend his lifespan, eventually downloading his own mind into a computer and letting his body peacefully expire, already full of metal and diodes. He will then truly become an iron man.
You guys got any more?
I’ve breached a thousand hits in about a week! Woo!
Thanks so much, everyone!
In celebration, I’m pleased to welcome Tig Notaro to the show.
The following was written in February, and published in May in RVA Magazine. It was also published on Tehillah, my old blog.
Pow! A single punch flew, and I was right there, as Spider-Man moved in to drag the deadly enemy to the ground. He was fighting for his mind, for his identity. Tricked into a mist of illusion by the aptly-named Mysterio, the web-head punched and kicked and swung his way back to lucidity, struggling to clear the mist in his head. All his doubts, all his self-hatred was poured out in front of him, the illusions of his friends and family telling him “Don’t be a hero! Better to use your power for yourself – get rich! Get women!” But how could that be true? Spider-Man had done so much for so many. Isn’t that what heroes have always done? And I was there for it all, for every punch in the thick and swirling fog.
It was Web of Spider-Man # 90, one of my very first comics. I’d been reading them for maybe four or five months at that point, and had made the transition between the Superman books my dad had brought home for me one night, and the Spider-Man and X-Men books of my contemporaries. I didn’t have very many, and those I did have were so strange, so confusing. They were too wrapped up in that thick, endless continuity, in story details, in plot for a nine year-old to follow; the Superman books had him stuck as a time-travelling amnesiac for some godawful reason, and in X-Men there was all of that and more: hidden identities, cloning, mind-transfer. And so many heavy questions, which all basically came down to “what the hell is going on,” hung over the books. But I was still so young that I didn’t even know how to begin following these stories, and I kept reading, and reading, and reading them. I picked them up in little drops; an issue here from Uncanny X-Men, one from Excalibur, another from Web of Spider-Man. But I kept reading, and on Christmas 1993, before I was old enough to really appreciate the mind-boggling gift I was being given, my dad bought me the first two issues of Alex Ross’s Marvels.
Marvels, you have to understand, is a masterpiece, and I appreciated it as much as I could. I hardly knew what to make of it. First, the book didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. It was painted. It was lifelike. It was 1993, and in 1993 all comic books looked pretty much the same – unreasonably bulging muscles on dark, unshaven, gritty antiheroes in body armor carrying P90 submachine guns, or covered in spikes and arcane cloaks, or in hideous single-piece spandex suits inexplicably teamed with trench-coats. But Marvels looked to the past. The superheroes looked like, well, superheroes. And not only that, but I was no longer accompanying them on their adventures. I wasn’t a participant anymore – I was a witness, on the sidelines, watching with breathless awe, or with heart-stopping fear, and I could both see the destruction they caused and the sheer physical beauty of the battles themselves, which only made it seem even more real. And though I didn’t know it at the time, it raised serious issues and questions and got me thinking about superheroes in a very particular way.
The seeds were planted before then. Comics are supposed to be fun, right? And when I was a kid, I could read them for fun. I wasn’t too concerned about story arcs or crossovers or continuity. It was the characters and their adventures across the page. I couldn’t worry too much about how these soap operas resolved themselves, as long as I knew that Gambit loved Rogue, but could never touch her, or her power would kill him, or that nobody could really take down Wolverine – the little fuzzball had the metal stripped from his skeleton and survived! But it was never only for fun, because, you see, I read Marvel comics, and Marvel’s books always had some sort of overarching spin or theme. So from the beginning I was trained to look a little deeper in my books – at X-Men’s fable on tolerance, for example, or at Spider-Man’s bitter obligation – “with great power comes great responsibility.” But in Marvels, Alex Ross tried to take the whole idea of the superhero, the romping madmen who traipsed about in colorful spandex doing good deeds, and think about what it means.
When you’re a kid, maybe you don’t think about meaning too much. I didn’t, at least. Superheroes spoke to something in me, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Apparently, neither could the comic book business. Starting with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which imagined the Batman as despairing and brutal, there had been a spontaneous rebellion against the aging, standard superhero stories and types. Maybe Superman was just too much of a Boy Scout for the harsh realities of the 1980’s, but whatever the reason was, suddenly comics were packed with cynical and violent characters claiming to be the heroes of the new generation. They killed. They carried big guns. They were Spawn, and Venom, and Cable, mercenaries and demons, all id and no superego. They were completely unrestrained and unrestrainable, unstoppable forces of will and individualism. They were vicious, punk rock heroes for the grunge age. Unlike Superman, they didn’t fight for a better world or for abstract values. They fought to fight. Though I didn’t know it at the time, could hardly be aware of it, the basic principle of the superhero was being questioned.
So, with Marvels, and later Kingdom Come, Alex Ross took that question to heart, and started at the beginning.
Now, for little nine-year-old Brian, this wasn’t important. I didn’t know any of this. Hell, all I knew were the grim-and-gritty heroes. Marvels met me there in my ignorance. Suddenly heroes were complex and layered. Suddenly their actions had consequences. Suddenly, heroes were people acting in a world I could comprehend. That was probably the biggest leap Ross made for me – by placing the focus on the street rather than in the sky, these events weren’t completely separate from my experience. My God, how would it feel to see the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner battling in the skies above me? How could I react? How must I? These weren’t the pure, sugary heroes of stereotype, nor were they the overwrought characters I’d known; they were moral agents of change, both positive and negative.
I only ever had the first two issues, and I lost the second one within a year. The first, then, stuck with me the most, and I still feel like I’m nine years old when I see the man on fire flying through the sky, or the tidal wave falling over the Brooklyn Bridge. I approached the series again twelve years later, when I was twenty-one, and could look at it more critically. With a little more literary experience under my belt, I could see in Marvels, if not a deliberate rejection of self-conscious antiheroes, at the least nostalgia for the old traditions. It seemed to me that Ross was deliberately lionizing the classic heroes of his youth in a purposeful contrast with the violent, selfish heroes of the early 1990’s.
Over the course of the four-part series, Ross goes from the first heroes in the Second World War to Spider-Man in the 1960’s, and our point-of-view man spends the whole time trying to figure out what it means for a man to live when supermen seemed to be seizing the world, and what it means for the heroes to be here at all. Our protagonist, Phil Sheldon, maintains for much of the last issue that heroes exist to protect the weak, but is crushed at Spider-Man’s failure to stop Gwen Stacy, his girlfriend at the time, from being killed. Losing his ability to keep searching, he decides to pass off the question to the next generation; tellingly, the young boy in question would grow up
to be the violent, destructive Ghost Rider.
What good is power if you can’t save the innocent? It’s the sort of moral question I’d become interested between 1993 and 2005, with a stark deliberateness fueled by adventurous forays into Christian anthropology, the theological study of man and man’s role and purpose. In my own comic work, I’ve attempted to raise some of the same questions. I believe very strongly that Ross answers the question with some finality in Kingdom Come (DC Comics, 1995), his follow-up to Marvels.
If you don’t know the plot to Kingdom Come, I’ll sum it up fairly briefly: the world is awash with violent anti-heroes who have taken to simply fighting among themselves for fun. Led by a cyborg named Magog, they inadvertently cause a nuclear accident, wiping out Kansas and bringing Superman, before convinced that the world no longer needed him, out of retirement. He builds a coalition consisting of the classic DC Heroes – Wonder Woman, the Flash, the Green Lantern – to convince this new coterie of the obligation they have to the public good. However, Superman has lost his sense of moral strength, and events spin wildly out of control, and before long, Armageddon has broken out; a towering battle between the two sides that threatens to engulf the world. Stopped only by a nuclear detonation, Superman comes to realize that their rightful place is to work alongside man, not rule over them; that, in the end, they are not gods.
Maybe I’m biased. I’m a communitarian, which is to say that I believe in the community good over the individual good, and in finding self-identity in relationship to others. Man’s greatness and man’s purpose are both ordered to community life. It’s why we have families and friends, and even the most cynical of us gets lonely. So when I say that Ross sets up Kingdom Come as a battle between communitarianism, the order of self-sacrifice and greater good represented by Superman, Wonder Woman, and their ilk, and libertarianism, the radical, self-generating individual unconstrained by morality, it should be clear who I’m rooting for, and why. It’s the Nietzschean superman versus the Superman himself. What’s at stake is whether Spider-Man’s old trope about great responsibility is and can be proven true. Ross took the pivotal idea about superheroes and heroism, the sacrificing, if sometimes misguided, force for public good so pivotal to Marvels, and puts it in the crucible to see if there’s anything good there at all; To see if it can survive. Kingdom Come is the chemical reaction. The tragedy and bedlam is the heat of the catalysis.
It had to happen. The cultural movement towards the comic book antihero was long, and has roots even in the early work of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who first toyed with the concept in a short story called “Reign of the Super-Man.” The writing of Jack Kerouac glorified the individual and the individual’s quest above the community orientation of the immediately preceding generation, and the authority that found its champion in Superman was intensely scrutinized during the Nixon years. By the time the 1980’s had rolled around, postmodernism finally reached comic books. But the old breed and new existed side by side even as the latter ridiculed the former as being outdated and naïve. Even Captain America briefly turned his back on the flag.
So the conflict is also over meaning, and whether or not there is substance to idealism and symbols. These are questions that matter to me, and I believe should matter to everyone. As long as I’ve believed in God, I’ve believed in symbols and in idealism. So the fight, the conflict, the debate matters. In Marvels, Ross proposed that heroes are here to be our protectors, but in Kingdom Come, we see the cost of that. Superheroes are ultimately the victims of the original Greek tragic flaw: hubris. From Spider-Man on, those with powers have seen it as their vocation and duty to protect the weak. But to them, everyone is and must be weak. The powers elevate them above mankind, and in Kingdom Come, mankind rebels against that patronizing condescension. By taking themselves as the protectors of the people, they take from them responsibility for their own lives. They take from man, man’s destiny. They take man’s greatness.
That’s the problem. That’s the problem Ross was looking for in Marvels but never quite found, and emerged in strength in Kingdom Come. That’s the problem that I spent years wondering about and have struggled to resolve in my own work. Superheroes are not gods. If their great powers give great responsibility, it is the responsibility to inspire. In Superman, always the archetypal hero, I think I’ve found the model of everything they’re supposed to be, the resolution to the question that has driven me. I’ve always believed that Superman’s greatest ability isn’t his super-strength, or his heat-vision, or his ability to fly so fast that time itself moves backwards. It’s his moral sense, his humility, his clarity of vision. And these are all the human virtues he learned from his parents before he could do any of those things. All of those powers belong by right to Clark Kent and to everyone. Superman’s honest vocation, then, is not to fly around the world in blue tights, but to be, and I do not exaggerate here, holy.
Alex Ross answers his question. What are superheroes for? In our world, the real world, where they exist only in comics and on films, just as much as in their own, this question needed to be answered. And who knew the answer was so simple?
Superheroes exist to inspire man to spiritual and moral greatness. In the end, that is all any of us have to be.
UPDATE: Some recent comments from Kurt Busiek indicate that he had a much larger role in the production of Marvels than I indicated in this article. I would like to publicly acknowledge my mistake, and offer my sincerest apologies.
God reminds me of some things, which I believe are good lessons for all Christians, and I am humbled to think I forgot lessons so basic. They are the core, the center, the very purpose of Christianity. They are the ancient path trod by saints for two-thousand years and by them codified again and again and again. It is the core of the message of Christ.
Repent.
That’s the key, oh, how true, the key! We as Western Christians have so long focused on forgiveness, the idea that we no longer need fear condemnation, that God has forgotten our sins that we’ve neglected to remember — instead of actively forgotten — that this is only the first step.
I routinely ask this question of people: why are you a Christian? Would you be a Christian had Christ and the Apostles said nothing about heaven? If we had no idea of it? What if all Christ had taught us was to repent and be changed? Would you still be a Christian?
Culturally, the answer tends to be “no.” We are largely Christians because we want the promised reward, and were there no ice cream at the end of the party we would have left right after the entertainment. And so we focus on the part of the message that seems to concern eternity most directly: namely, that our sins are forgiven, and God will not condemn us, because we have placed our faith in Christ. Therefore our bill is squared away, our debts forgiven, our signature affixed under Christ’s to the bill. We have been set free, but only, it seems, from the natural consequence of sin. When we do fail, though we may feel bad and hope to do better, we have no practical hope or expectation that personal reformation is possible, desirable, or even necessary. We’ve been promised that we won’t be expelled from the party and assured our ice cream. Heaven awaits us, so why even worry?
This isn’t to say that we consciously take this attitude, or that most Christians fail to even try to do better — but it is an underlying attitude of much of Western Christianity, and I do not judge Catholicism any better than Protestantism in this regard. As long as we keep our focus so exclusively on God’s forgiveness, we’re missing the bulk of the Gospel, most of which we relegate to lists of things we shouldn’t do, and as we read it, we think to ourselves, “Well, I’m not a drunkard or a fornicator or an idolator; I’m a respectable person! I go to mass!” So we use those verses to put a fear of hell in nonbelievers, failing to remember that they were written to us.
The first word of Christ’s ministry was “repent;” it’s an old trope but a true one. He forgives sins, to be sure, but his message is not “I forgive you,” but “repent of your sins.” But what’s repentance? Is repentance asking God’s forgiveness? Is it repentance when you go and join a church for the first time? We can examine the word in so many languages. In Hebrew it literally means “turn around,” to start back down the road, to begin progressing towards God. In Greek, it’s metanoite, literally “rethink” or “reevaluate” and in English, ours is derived from French penser, to think, therefore “rethink.” Repentance is clearly more than the simple act of coming to faith in Christ. It’s God’s forgiveness that makes our repentance worth something, but it is the repentance itself that is transforming. In repentance, we begin conquering our sin through the grace of Christ day by day, growing closer to him. In repentance, we discipline our bodies and our minds and our spirits to be instruments of God’s will, to be healthy and functional parts of the Body. To live the lives were we meant to live.
This is the life for which we were liberate from sin. This is why we’ve been forgiven. To be holy. But holiness, we’ve convinced ourselves, is out of reach. Sure, some saints can do it. Mother Theresa, she was special. Francis? Out of our league. They might as well be Superman. Holiness is for ascetics and hermits and people who don’t mind talking to crazy homeless folks. Worse, we fear, holiness might turn us into crazy homeless folks. We tell stories of the heroic faith of our forebears, of the people who came before us and inspire us — but all they inspire us to do is feel good, not to actually change. We’re frightened. We’re spoiled. We’re pudgy and we don’t really want to be otherwise.
But we’ve been called to be holy! To be heroes! John Paul II wrote “never settle for less than the moral and spiritual greatness of which you all are capable.” It’s my favorite quote. But I settle for mediocrity every day. I get up, go to class, and then sit at my computer, listen to music, and watch TV. Where is the spiritual greatness in that? What’s worse, we’re so used to this by now, we have absolutely no idea what we’re capable of. Some of us go on Alternative Spring Break or on silent retreats and there we get a tantalizing taste of a life worth living, transformed by service and prayer into something worth a damn. But when it’s over, we go right back to Chik-Fil-A and our Playstations.
All this from missing the point of forgiveness. All this from forgetting repentance.
But this is what Christ asks of us. Isn’t that enough?
Velveteen Rabbi, this Jewish blog I read, has an absolutely stunning post up about the security wall.
Sarah told us a story about a Palestinian who really needed to get to West Jerusalem, but couldn’t get permission to cross the wall, so he took a taxi to the place where the wall isn’t yet completed and walked across and then took another taxi back to the heart of the city. The moral of that story: the wall doesn’t actually stop determined individuals who want to get to West Jerusalem. What the wall does do is stop social and economic life.
Because it wouldn’t be Saint Superman without some great Youtube videos.
A much better exploration of some of my ideas about our national character,
The Never-Ending Quest to Make Jesus Just Some Guy
The trouble with this sort of thing is that the only thing that could disprove Christianity is to actually find Christ’s indisputable corpse. But they’ll keep looking, because it’s easier to believe we’re empty shells than people filled with life. The modern challenge to Christianity is to maintain that, not only is it untrue, but that it is in fact a malicious lie designed to take away from man’s purpose and dignity. The big joke is that these are the same people who believe man has no purpose or inherant dignity, that everything’s just a big old chemical coincidence.
I’ve been meaning to write this. I planned on doing it yesterday, but found myself hanging with friends, playing some video games (or rather, struggling), and devising a children’s book based on Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the most inadvertantly entertaining movie I’ve ever seen. So yeah, I’ve been a little busy.
I’m not a terribly patriotic person. I’ve gotten in fights with my Air Force friend Tim over it, and tussled with my dad a couple of times, but it was futile to try to argue me out of it. I have a poor attitude towards my country that I’m not too sure is justifiable, and it’s something I struggle with; I fear I’m being shortsighted. My experience of patriotism in this country always finds its center in “We’re Number One!” and “jesUSAves” and that attitude of American exceptionalism that fuels Sean Hannity’s America. Patriotism seems resolutely coupled with jingoism, that we can’t love America without thinking the rest of world a dungheap in comparison.
So much of America’s national identity, the things we place all our stock in, is our political system. We talk about the the Constitution like its the Bible, the Founders like the Apostles. Our fouding documents are sacred, our memorials are temples and obelisks, and we portray George Washington taking his place among the Gods. We generally come from pretty religious stock, but that doesn’t make us Christians; it just convinces us that we are ourselves part of some divine mission, our government the government of nature, our land blessed and married, and the power we have in the world a mandate to spread our values. We are unabashed capitalists and inadvertant autocrats, and we ask our presidents to be priest, prophet, and king.
At some point, all of this began to bother me; it was right around the time I started to realize that Catholicism was more than apologetics and axioms and arguments, and tried to apply it to the things I believed about the world. I lost my patriotism when I became convinced we treated the Constitution like a new gospel, the American Dream as though it were Christian praxis, and our own power as though we deserved it. We possess a devastating strength, and should by right by truly humbled by it, especially if we think it’s something God gave us. But we brandish it like gunslingers, and think that, because of it and because of who we are, we’re better than the rest of the world.
It was a little awkward, then, going to celebrate Independence Day weekend with some friends up in DC this weekend. Like I said, I’m no patriot, but I love a good fireworks show, and I’m American, no way around it, so the day certainly has some significance. The day was pretty miserably rainy, and I sinned in losing my temper over it. I was miserable, bored, and the whole affair seemed ridiculous; hanging out in the rain, terribly thirsty, for nine hours waiting for for a fifteen minute fireworks show.
John Paul II wrote that patriotism is a good thing, something that could buoy up the Christian heart and develop and strengthen the values of community and self-sacrifice that are absolutely vital to a Christian life, and that culture as the expression of community could be and should be holy. John Paul II believed in Poland, in communities as objective goods given by God in our very nature. He believed we were made for communal existence, that it’s written on our hearts, and that the places we live and the festivals we celebrate and how we eat dinner could be all be expressions of the grace of God acting in the world in those crazy ways we never think about.
I can’t help but think that his expression of patriotism was fostered by his formative years being in Nazi Poland, where the occupiers were trying to stamp out Polishness period, and he found the resistance of culture to be both more effective and entirely more holy than armed rebellion, and in his experience under the Communists, where the government tried to portray communism as the natural expression of that same culture even as it struggled to suppress Catholicism. For John Paul, Polishness was tied to Catholicism, right to the character of the people.
The United States, though, has difficulty making such a claim. We’re an officially secular, or at least pluralist, country comprised of people from every background trying to strike that delicate balance. The realy national value is belief in democracy and an inherited British sense of not bothering people. We’re absurdly politicized, and instead of our Christianity, for instance, informing our politics, our politics have informed our Christianity.
I recall reading once about an email going out about illegal immigration, and what the proper Christian response should be — but their proposed Christian response was just the conservative response. Conservatism and Christianity had become so intertwined for these people that they’d lost any sense of where one began and the other ended.
I’m interested in what that means about us, and if a real, healthy, holy patriotism, the patriotism centered on the love for your community and not your government or political ideals, is even really possible here.
