The Death of Comic Books

Left to right: Snowflake, Safespace, Screentime, Trailblazer, and B-Negative.

Marvel Comics has released a series supposed to be hep and with-it for the youngsters of Generation Z, “The New Warriors,” showcasing heroes named “Screentime,” “Safespace,” and “Snowflake.” The brainchild of a writer named Daniel Kibblesmith.

This looks like the end of Marvel Comics; perhaps of comics generally. If not the world.

I was, in my younger days, a fierce devotee of Marvel Comics, back in the Silver Age. Like everyone else, I’ve also enjoyed the recent movies, for the most part, with my own kids.

I do not love the movies so much as I did the comics, and I have not followed the comics for some time.

This is because I discovered mythology; I discovered the stories in their original versions.

The secret to the success of 1960s Marvel was that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their gang knew the stories. Probably because they were all Jewish kids growing up reading the Torah. They were retelling the essential stories in modern Spandex.

The “super-hero” is simply the legendary hero, as he always has been. Heroes have superpowers. Perseus could fly; Herakles had superhuman strength.

Superhero comics before Fantastic Four, however, were missing an essential element: heroes lead troubled lives. They have problems; they are outcasts. Robin Hood; the Heroes of the Water Margin; Samson and Delilah. The creators of Superman and Batman missed this.

Superheroes—heroes—come from the storehouse imagination. We are inclined to think that the imagination is random and limitless. To the contrary, to the imagination only some things are real—vivid to the mind’s eye—and they are a limited set. Every culture has dragons, and dragons have certain known features. There are no dragons in nature. Every culture has unicorns, and unicorns have certain identifiable features, although there are no unicorns in nature. Every culture has fairies, elves, ogres, and so on.

The bright colours and the solid line art are also part of the mix; it is no coincidence that the art in comic books resembles the art of the stained glass window. This is how things appear in the imagination: bright and distinct. Lines are solid; there are few shadows or gradients. Things simply are, or are not.

Kibblesmith seems to have no sense of any of this. He has read nothing. Hero legends, tapping the storehouse consciousness, speak of things eternal. Trying to be “trendy,” regardless of the trend, is anathema to the genre. It is like putting contemporary references in a cowboy movie.

One problem faced by the comic book author is that there are only a limited number of compelling superpowers. This is why there are so many near-duplicates in the DC and the Marvel universe. Iron Man, for example, the man made of metal with a fatal flaw, is Talos, the bronze giant of the Argonautica. The Thing is the Golem. The Flash, of course, is Hermes, Mercury. Everyone dreams of flying, like Superman. Everyone dreams of being invisible.

Kibblesmith does not get this, and tries to invent new powers. “Snowflake” throws projectiles shaped like snowflakes. There’s the stuff of legends. “Safespace” generates forcefields that arbitrarily protect others, but not himself. Not too useful in a bar fight. “Screentime,” thanks to the effects of “Internet gas,” is directly connected at all times to the Internet. Meaning, I guess, that he does not need to pull his iPhone out of his pocket like everybody else.

Snowflake and Safespace are plainly meant to reflect current ideas of fluid “gender identity”: the visibly male “Safespace” is pink, the visibly female “Snowflake” is baby blue, and supposedly “non-binary.” The message is the postmodern message that the imagination and its archetypes and associations are purely arbitrary and subject to conscious manipulation.

This is the opposite of the core message of comic books.

It is all mythically illiterate. Kibblesmith and the current Marvel are, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, playing with powers they do not comprehend. It will not go well for them.

Stan Lee Has Left the Baxter Building

Illustration by Lee's longtime collaborator, Jack Kirby.

A salute in passing to the great Stan Lee.

One should not lament. He died age 95. He got his innings in. Time to try something new.

But he was a major presence in my childhood, and probably is still a major influence on me.

He was, of course, the editor and writer behind Marvel Comics, back when it was becoming Marvel comics, the “silver age,” the creator or co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Iron Man, Thor, X-Men, Hulk, and the rest. Back when Lee was in command, I used to buy every title of Marvel comics every month, as soon as they came out: all the superhero comics, plus Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos, plus their three Western comics.

Before Lee, comic book superheroes were cut from cardboard, with no distinguishing features, it seemed, other than their specific powers. Otherwise, Aquaman was interchangeable with Superman, Flash, or Green Lantern. Lee gave them personalities, issues, struggles, and had them bicker with one another. Often they found themselves rejected by the public, or wanting to quit being a superhero.

While this was revolutionary in comicry—so much so that Lee thought it might get him fired, and only did it once he figured he was fed up with the job anyway—it was not really the innovation it seemed. What Lee was really doing was telling hero legends properly at last. He was returning to their origins.

For that is just what “super heroes” are or were: heroes. If you care to look, all classical or Medieval heroes had super powers. It is not some recent innovation. Perseus had winged sandals, and Medusa's deadly head. Herakles had a lion skin that made him invulnerable, and arrows of hydra poison. Bellerophon had a flying horse, Pegasus, which kept him out of harm's way, beyond the reach of Chimera paws. Achilles was invulnerable except at the heel. Arthur had his magical sword Excaliber. Solomon had a flying carpet, the mysterious shamir that could cut through anything, and could command demons. Generally, in the old stories, these were gifts from the classical gods or God, rather than the result of radiation or mutation—gifts from the great god Science.

And, unlike the DC superheroes of the Fifties, traditional heroes always had serious real-life problems. Herakles, for example, like Peter Parker, could never get a date. Worse, he now and then went mad, like Hulk. In one such fit, he killed his wife and children, thinking they were attacking aliens. Remorse over this drove him to become a hero, just as remorse over the death of his parents drove Peter Parker to become Spiderman.

Jason's wife was a witch, who killed their children. His king was out to have him killed. Perseus was betrayed by his grandfather, his stepfather, and his father-in-law. Samson also had significant women problems, as you might recall. And so did King Arthur. Moses was an outlaw, then rejected by his public.

Lee just reinserted this essential element to the mix, retoring to the stories their mythic power. Daredevil was blind, Thor in civilian life walked with a cane. The Hulk could not control his transformations. The government was out to get him. The Thing was repulsive to women, and taunted on the street. Iron Man's super suit was needed to keep his heart going.

Lee's advantage was probably that, being Jewish, he had been schooled in Torah. It includes all the classic stories. Other kids no longer learn the stories; they were all new to them. Lee simply mined them. The Fantastic Four, his first and to my mind greatest creation, seems based on Jewish demonology. Each of the members has one of the powers traditionally attributed in Jewish legend to demons: the ability to stretch at will, the ability to become invisible, being able, like the Muslim jinn, to burst into fire; and the Thing visually resembles the golem. This dark subtext gave great imaginative power.

Sub-Mariner, aka Prince Namur, appears in one of the earlier FF stories. Although he is the rightful ruler of an undersea kingdom, he is suffering amnesia, has forgotten who he is, and is living on the street as an alcoholic. Great story. It is one of the stories of King Solomon in the Talmud. There is also an echo of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel.

Daredevil's blindness echoes Samson's. Ant-man extended the parable of David and Goliath; his ability to control the ants is shared with Solomon.

Lee's famous burst of creativity in the Sixties was probably based on this mining of the Talmud. This is why it did not last into the Seventies; at a certain point, all the good stories have been told. I suspect Lee himself felt this coming, and this is why he turned to Norse mythology as well, with Thor: in search of new material. But here Lee himself had not yet digested the stories. He mostly told them verbatim as a second feature in the Thor comics. He was learning on the fly, and so the stories were not integral to his new character. Thor, as a result, comes across as wooden in a way his other heroes do not.

Since then, since Lee left, the comics have been wandering aimlessly, with no idea what the formula is. They learned nothing from Lee. They have gone for gimmicks: hey, let's make Captain America African American! Let's make Hulk female! Let's get political, and justify ourselves by taking all the “right” positions! Let's try celebrity tie-ins! Or worse, they make a phony splash by supposedly killing off a character, and then reviving him or her. These are all just so many sharks lined up in a row and jumped.

And one shark in the line generally gets a free lunch.

Why TV is Getting Better

If the prison is no longer secure, perhaps Rick and the others could consider relocating here.

Not everything is going to hell in a handcart. Currently, I am eagerly anticipating the new seasons of Downton Abbey and the Walking Dead. Television is getting much more interesting than it used to be, and far better than movies currently are.

So it goes; these things come in renaissances. Suddenly one medium or another will be fermenting. Popular music and comic books had amazing runs in the 1950s and 1960s. Films were really good in the 60s and 70s. Poetry was strong in the 50s. A variety of arts seemed relatively strong in the 60s, and now most seem relatively weak.

One cause, as I have previously lamented here, and as such worthies as TS Eliot and Samuel Beckett have lamented long before me, is that art has become increasingly dissociated from religion. Do that, and art dies. But within this general trend, the sudden lunges forward of specific media seem to fit an old observation by Marshall McLuhan: when a medium becomes obsolete, it become art. This makes sense: it has lost its practical use, and so, if it is going to continue at all, it will be for aesthetic reasons, among those who love the medium for aesthetic reasons.

Radio became obsolete in the 1950s, with the advent of TV. Hence the rise of popular music, specifically rock and roll, as new message for that medium. Film faced a less immediate threat of obsolescence from TV, and so reacted less dramatically and over a more extended period of time: we had a good run of artistic film-making beginning in the fifties and running through the seventies, with Hitchcock, Kubrick, the French auteurs, Scorsese’s Godfathers, and so on. Look at a list of great films of the Seventies, and you will marvel at how much that is memorable came out in such a short period. Comic books in turn can be understood as print’s reaction to TV—more specifically, pulp fiction’s reaction. There had been an earlier wave of comics, of course, the “Golden Age” of Superman and Batman, which was pulp’s reaction to radio.

He was right about everything. He just spoke fifty years too soon.

One can go back in time for other examples. The printing press gave us Shakespeare: the great Elizabethan age of drama came just when people started to be able to read, and to no longer need public performance for any practical purpose.

TV seems to be at that point now, beaten out of its prior position as primary medium by the Internet. It is no longer the main source of news and entertainment. It is no longer for everyman, or for the biggest profits from the greatest number. Hence we get interesting drama like Downton Abbey and the Walking Dead, appealing to a more discerning audience.

Meanwhile, radio and comic books, as their obsolescence deepens, have lost their ability to sustain a large enough audience for pop art purposes. They have had to become yet more specialized in their appeal. No more top forty, and no more cheap, mass-produced comics. They are moving from pop art, like rock and roll, in the direction of “high art.” Which is to say, really, either old art in rerun, or, if new, relatively lifeless, gloomy, and academic art. Generally living on charity from the public purse.

There is a fine line here: if a medium is the most efficient available, you get trashy entertainment for the masses. But on the other hand, you need a large enough audience to sustain real art, or artists cannot afford to create. They go into politics or academics or accountancy instead.

It died to give the world rock and roll.

Film is an interesting case in this regard. TV made it obsolete in the 50s. Then computer-generated special effects made it rise from the dead—courtesy of Spielberg, Lucas, and Pixar. FX were too expensive and time-consuming for TV, and did not play nearly as well on the small screen, including the computer monitor.

For now, all there is to do is to enjoy TV; along with a predictable renaissance in traditional, 2-D animation, notably from Japan. And wait for the next media technology to again reshuffle the playing pieces.